This is where i digress, Easel is great for beginners and im not saying it is’nt.
What I’m saying is Easel is great for beginners but absolutely useless for advanced users I have all ready pulled the arduino out and I will proberly never put it back in. The market for Easel to be a great web based cnc program that could import .whatever and leave the basic functions of what easel is but open it up for add ons like Firefox does with its community if you don’t do this you are just wasting time with a toy cause, that’s all Easel will ever be.
I’ve been able to do some pretty cool stuff in Easel but I am pushing it to it’s limits. It currently isn’t handling it’s only import option very well and files with a lot of details crash it. I don’t think 3D is anywhere on the horizon for Easel without a complete overhaul.
That being said, it is a nice little program for simple stuff and I really appreciated having it on day one to start cutting out of the gate while I began looking at other options.
Hey guys,
Keep in mind that not only is Easel still in its infancy, but they’re doing a complete rewrite of the backbone so that it can play nice with V-Carve. This is a major undertaking. As it stands right now, they’ve put thousands of development hours into Easel. Plus, in the few months that I’ve been an active Easel user, they’ve added all kinds of cool apps to make it unbelievably more useful and user friendly. It’s like watching my son learn to walk. This is an exciting time to be a user. We’ve seen their product and software mature a great deal. Take for instance the box maker and inlay apps. We’re basically observers on the ground floor of a start-up, seeing the massive shifts in priorities that agile software development allows. Yes, it can be frustrating when your baby can barely walk and you need to get somewhere, but with the right attitude, it’s possible to appreciate the journey along the way to the destination. Remember, Easel is free. If you want a mature CNC software package, then you’re more than welcome to fork out big $'s for V-Carve. Currently with Easel, you can’t have it both ways. As for me, I’m doing just about everything I need with 3rd party software like Inkscape and AutoCAD, so the Image Vectorizer app (which was one of the first they put up by the way) can allow me to use Easel for much more advanced projects than it could’ve generated by itself.
My $0.02 and I’m willing to make change…
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So far, my experience with Inventables has been first class. I’d be willing to bet they have good things going on behind the scenes.
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This is perfect. Easel can certainly be better but it is certainly getting better every day. And it MUST NOT get more complicated. It’s niche is for the beginner/non-professional that doesn’t have endless hours to learn a commercial program. Hopefully the added functionality will be “add-ons” so it doesn’t become overly complicated for the newbies.
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But what happens when the beginner discovers that there are better ways to control a CNC machine. They then have to unlearn all they learned and learn how the big boys do it correctly.
I do not believe that it takes “endless hours” to learn other CAD and CAM programs.
Dave
Ariel, WA
well of course there ARE third variables… like how big you brain is, how many young children you have at home, the hours a week you work at your job, how many jobs you have and whether or not your spouse is supporting your exploration. And memory helps too. One hour here or there, I find it difficult to retain important details. I am still learning new capabilities of Mach 3 and I swear I have learned some of them before. 
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How about a second ,more advanced version ,
They could Call it " EaselUS for the rest of us"
Then we would have 2 versions to choose from .