I don’t see why 3D formats shouldn’t be the highest priority - it’s a 3D machine, it should do 3D milling. SVG is very non-standard and very limiting. Not in the least because it’s not measurement driven.
Because STL is already very prominent in 3D printing it’s a logical choice, although from an engineering point of view IGES and STEP are much better because IGES and STEP are ‘vector’ formats (well, they are shape definition formats) so they don’t have limited resolution and can take advantage of g-codes for curves instead of making lots of tiny line segments, whereas STL is a mesh format which messes up toolpath generation.
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Emile.
Please bear in mind what the X-Carve and Easel is all about. It’s an introduction to the wonderful world of tearing chunks out of big bits of materials to make smaller bits of materials for those people who are not engineers or CNC experts. 
I agree that the software and hardware could be much more complex, could use industry standards (many to choose from), could have many more features. But in turn would be much more difficult to use by the intended audience and they would probably be barred from entry by the much larger cost.
I’d also suggest that the X-Carve is not a 3D machine. It’s 2.5D (with my I admit, novice understanding).
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a pop and I agree in principle with many of your points. I personally just don’t want to see the X-Carve/Easel offering become like many other semi/pro tools out there with ridiculous costs and tool chains longer than my arm.
Cheers
Ian
It’s a fallacy to think of complexity as being daunting, or to think of a low-end machine as something that should not be capable of high-end stuff. A good tool does what it says on the tin, a great tool lets the user grow into something better.
There are many good examples of complexity done wrong in CNCing, this is the main reason why I never got into it. Mach3 is annoying as f uck to use, building your own CNC from scratch is just a recipe for continuous maintenance instead of progress. You’re just fixing stuff that breaks all the time, leaving no time for improving the machine or… you know, using it productively.
There are also many good examples of simplicity done wrong. A great example is Apple software and hardware, which does exactly what it says on the tin and prevents you from doing anything else. Another example is lots of commercial plug&play 3D printers, which have very restrictive toolchains and expensive supplies, which in turn means that literally everybody who buys one of those uses it once and then throws it into a corner because it doesn’t do what they want it to do.
Expanding Easel to include 3D machining, 2-sided machining, using proper import formats and all that doesn’t change the base program to be more daunting to new users. No, instead it allows for users to grow into the machine. Physically, the X-carve is capable of a whole damn lot, it’s easily competitive with machines 5 times its base price. Right now, people who know what they’re doing use their own toolchains to actually let the machine do that kind of stuff, but there’s no reason why something like Easel shouldn’t be able to do that. I mean, it’s not rocket science. 3D printing has been doing this for a couple of years already - with open source software and firmware. Machining doesn’t need to be ‘simple’ at the low end, and then this giant vertical cliff of a learning curve to use professional CAM tools.
I really foresee a future of machining that’s basically like 3D printing is now. Easy to get into, but capable of the world if you try a bit harder.
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I’ll have to look into Inkscape, thanks for the recommendation.
As for measurement and alignment tools, It has the bare minimum. I really wish it had better support for multilayer object though. Ever try placing a deeper square within a larger shallow square? elements just get lost within other elements! Every value have to be typed in my hand. I would be great to have it help by giving me guide lines and helping me center elements. Snapping tools, etc. Maybe even give me access to “layers” and allow me to group objects together. Ever use XCode? It has amazing snapping tools that makes designing a UI painless. (but this is just a would be nice to have feature)
As for STL (or DXF), it should be a priority. Creating a SVG requires multiple applications. If easel is supposed to be a tool for everybody, it shouldn’t require hours of research on how to get your 3D model Imported. Personally I’d love to see OBJ support. I still haven’t been able to create a proper SVG. I’ve tried sketchup, Fusion360, whatever that gcode tool is. It’s all a pain in the ■■■. I have a 3D file, and if I was using a makerbot right now, all I would need to do it import the OBJ and click print. Simple as that.
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So. After having 8 copies of one job to make changes. I would love a saving/folder system. So I can save certain jobs in a sub folder. So I can seperste genres and styles. After 4 pages. It gets daunting.
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It’s this type of stuff that makes this Community Great!
For “Save As” functionality, it’s a 2 step process.
- Select “Make a copy” from the “File” menu
- In the new version, "select “Rename” from the “File” menu
This has the same effect as “Save As”, at least for making another copy in order to rev it. You can select a naming scheme as you would with a file based naming of appending “_rev1” etc to the name.
Folders I can see being useful once the number of projects grows large.
Also, it took me a while, but the little icon that looks like a TV on a stand on the top left opens the project selection window back up.
As for 3D, I would vote on not really adding that functionality into Easel, at least in basic mode. There is a divide in complexity between programs that do 2/2.5D and 3D. I would say improve Easel to be good 2/2.5D, you can see where they are going with the Carvey, Get those basics down, like adding folders to projects, and then worry about additional stuff like 3D.
Hit the nail right on the head 100%. Before Easel and back in the Shapeoko 2 days, there was only the open wilds to guide you and few “limits” to what could be done. Everyone swore the Shapeoko could never mill aluminum with good repeatable results. Proving that wrong was a great experience and was not overly hard to do in the end. Easel could grow into something just like yo speak of and be such a great tool from EVERYONE on the X Carve and it would really put the X Carve into a new class of mill as folks pushed the limits and expanded what “it can do” by having a powerful tool to work with.
The X Carve is a good router style mill. It has great strengths and acceptable limits for the style of mill it is. CAD/CAM software can be expensive as I know very well first hand. If Easel were to grow in the directions mentioned here, it would raise the X-Carve right along with it. I never used Easel as it came out long after I have learned CAD and found HSM for CAM. Any CAD software is going to have a steep learning curve and I know that the makers of Easel are working to lower that curve as best they can. But I think EmileNijssen has a point that limiting Easel will in the end hurt it far worse then it it offers higher levels of CAD/CAM work to advanced users.
This is a follow-up to several posters who have recommended Inkscape. I’m also an engineer who recently purchased an x-carve and wanted to do some 3d relief carving. The latest Inkscape version 0.91 comes bundled with an extension called Gcodetools. It’s not the easiest plugin to work with, but after watching some youtube tutorials and plenty of trial and error, I’ve been able to generate some very adequate gcode using highly complex SVG files.
Those of you who are not wanting to purchase artcam or v-carve pro will be happy to know that the plugin supports 3d relief carving by extrapolating height based on greyscale. The only thing missing was the M3 S##### speed control command from the gcode file, but easy enough to add on your own.
I ran into one issue which required some slight hacking. The gcodetools plugin will generate commands longer than 50 characters. I recommend using the post-processing filter to round decimals to 4 places. I am using Debian linux and control the x-carve with the java-based program Universal-G-Code-Sender. The current version does not support commands over 50 characters even though the version of GRBL shipped with the xcarve supports commands up to 70 characters.
I ended up downloading the UGCS source code from github, then grepping through the src directory for the variable maxCommandLength and changing any occurrences of the value 50 to 70. Then mvn clean package.
Here’s the repository with the modified code:
This will only work with later versions of GRBL.
For the money… absolutely free!!.. this solution was well worth
the effort. If you are familiar with pycam 2d extrusion and symmetric
multi-processing across multiple machines to produce 3d relief gcode files, let me
re-assure you. This procedure generates very usable gcode on a single,
dual core or quad-core machine within minutes and is completely
open-source.
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The current version of UGS will allow you to increase the number of characters on a line
Under the settings/Sender Setting menu/ Change the Max Command Length to 70
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