Thanks for the "review" NoseGoblin. For the time being I don't intend to be doing any proper 3D, so I'll just keep an eye on things and maybe give the respective packages a test drive at some point.
For now I'm just excited to be cutting precision 2D forms such as this:
It's a small PCB for work onto which that green connector directly fits. I did a test cut in MDF yesterday (during which I discovered that I had calculated the steps per revolution incorrectly) and this morning decided to bite the bullet and cut into some FR4 copper clad board. The 2mm diameter carbide cutters sent to me by Bar worked fantastically for this. I used an engraving cutter that came with the machine for making the copper isolation cuts, but I need to get some with a sharper point for doing real (finer) PCB work.
The board was drawn in Altium designer, printed to PDF and imported into Inkscape where it was cleaned up and an offset path generated as the toolpath (a 1mm offset corresponding to the 1mm radius of the cutter). From there I converted the SVG to G-Code using PyCAM.
This process is about to become WAY simpler as I have been speaking to Andrej and he is adding board outline milling to his Gerber import process. He had a beta version of USB CNC with this addition available less than 12 hours after I suggested it to him!
It turned out very nicely - now I have to make 50 of them. I'm tossing up whether to just duplicate 50 times and generate the G-code from that, or learn how to do subroutines and have the G-Code generate an array of offset duplicates.
Oh yeah I can make that....