Overview

oc-freecad-cam exposes FreeCAD's Path workbench in a fluent python API that takes OCP TopoDS_Shape objects and their wrappers from CadQuery and Build123d to enable generating parametric tool paths from the comfort of your keyboard.

⚠ NOTE ⚠

This project is fairly experimental at this stage. Expect bugs and always double-check the generated gcode for naughty surprises.

Usage

See documentation at https://ocp-freecad-cam.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Installation

ocp-freecad-cam does not attempt to install runtime dependencies. Your environment must have available CadQuery and/or Build123d, or just OCP if you're feeling raw.

ocp-freecad-cam is available on pypi: https://pypi.org/project/ocp-freecad-cam/

ocp-freecad-cam requires currently a relatively fresh build of FreeCAD, ie. weekly build from https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases/tag/weekly-builds

The Path module of FreeCAD has seen major refactorings in 2023 so older versions are not compatible.

Runtime dependencies summary

• FreeCAD weekly 2023-06-04 or newer
• OCP
  • CadQuery
  • Build123d

Dev dependecies

Dev dependencies are listed in requirements-dev.txt, generated from requirements-dev.in with pip-compile

Using FreeCAD AppImage

Weekly AppImage is an easy way to get started. Download the AppImage, place it in a suitable empty folder and extract it.

mkdir ~/freecad
cp ~/Downloads/FreeCAD_weekly-builds-33345-2023-06-04-conda-Linux-x86_64-py310.AppImage ~/freecad
cd ~/freecad
chmod +x ./FreeCAD_weekly-builds-33345-2023-06-04-conda-Linux-x86_64-py310.AppImage
./FreeCAD_weekly-builds-33345-2023-06-04-conda-Linux-x86_64-py310.AppImage --appimage-extract

Configuring FreeCAD paths

For this module to work, it needs to be able to find

1. FreeCAD C libraries
2. FreeCAD Path python libraries
3. (AppImage only?) Some other Python modules located in FreeCAD's site-packages

This can be done by updating your virtual environment PYTHONPATH or by creating a pth file in site-packages.

The three paths (also contents of the .pth file) for the above AppImage example are

/home/user/freecad/squashfs-root/usr/lib
/home/user/freecad/squashfs-root/usr/Mod/Path
/home/user/freecad/squashfs-root/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/

in a file like

/home/user/miniconda3/envs/cq/lib/python3.10/site-packages/freecad.pth

Limitations

Pocket3D does not work, possibly related to FreeCAD/FreeCAD#6815 - shouldn't be a big loss though, Surface3D can get the same things done IMO.

VCarve can produce unstable toolpaths, but that is probably a bug in the underlying openvoronoi library. Tweaking the job params may help.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome.

• Missing params, fixes
• Tests
• Documentation

PR's

Apply black and isort and ensure that tests pass. Preferably also include test coverage for new code.