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 is available on pypi: https://pypi.org/project/ocp-freecad-cam/ ocp-freecad-cam does not attempt to install runtime dependencies since it's designed to run with any combination of these three:

• CadQuery
• Build123d
• OCP

Additionally, FreeCAD module needs to be available.

General guideline for hooking on FreeCAD

There are at least three options to approach this

1. Using the FreeCAD Python interpreter
2. Using system interpreter with the same major version as the FreeCAD Python interpreter
3. Compiling FreeCAD to use the system interpreter

Number one is now the recommended way and will be documented below

Acquiring FreeCAD

Again, three options. Please use at least version 0.21.

1. Official distributions https://www.freecad.org/downloads.php
2. Official portable packages https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases
   • includes weekly packages
3. voneiden's fork of portable packages https://github.com/voneiden/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases
   • uses an older version of OpenSSL and there are also some python 3.11 packages

Linux AppImage installation example using a venv

This is fairly straightforward. Download the AppImage, extract it, create a virtual environment from the included interpreter, include lib, activate it and install your preferred packages.

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html

mkdir freecad
cd freecad 
wget https://github.com/voneiden/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases/download/0.21.2/FreeCAD_0.21.2-2023-12-26-conda-Linux-x86_64-py311.AppImage
chmod +x FreeCAD_0.21.2-2023-12-26-conda-Linux-x86_64-py311.AppImage
./FreeCAD_0.21.2-2023-12-26-conda-Linux-x86_64-py311.AppImage --appimage-extract
./squashfs-root/usr/bin/python -m venv --system-site-packages fcvenv
echo "$PWD/squashfs-root/usr/lib" > fcvenv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/freecad.pth
source fcenv/bin/activate
pip install cadquery build123d ocp-freecad-cam 

Test that your interpreter works by running

python -c "import FreeCAD"

Windows 7z installation example

While I would suggest using WLS, if you want to stick to pure windows, the general idea is the same as above in the linux example with two exceptions.

1. Instead of "$PWD/squashfs-root/usr/lib" > fcvenv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/freecad.pth use

"$($PWD)\..\src" | Out-File -FilePath "fcvenv\Lib\site-packages\ocp_freecad_cam.pth"

or create the pth file manually somehow. Just note that the venv file structure is a bit different on Windows.

2. Instead of source you activate the venv with just

.\fcvenv\Scripts\activate

Dev dependecies

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

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.