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#ProfileCAD

A little Background

I'm a machinist with a background in electronics. Everything from big servers to tiny embedded projects. I love engineering and fabricating so naturally I spend a lot of time drawing in cad. The problem is, my background in electronics has left me with a strong dislike for anything Microsoft and most notably there junk of an operating system that seems to be appealing to company's with products like Mastercam, Surfcam, bobCAD, etc. I understand that these companies exist because there profitable and the only way there going to be profitable is to stay with windows.

Whats the big deal?

So I like Mastercam 8. It does everything really well. We use it at work every day. That's all great. But when I'm not at work using a dedicated Windows XP machine to draw with, Im at home trying to run Mastercam in Virtual box on my mac book. Or wasting my time with Wine or Cross works just to find out its even less stable there than in a VM that blue screens randomly without any type of useful information related to why there was an error.

Is't there already something out there?

Draftworks autocad clone, QCad, libreCAD, MeshCAM, pyCAD, OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, blah, blah, blah... All with one thing in common. I can't go from a drawing to a machined part without pushing a mutilated dxf file through a series of meat grinder like scripts. Then the GCODE has to be gone through with a fine comb to make sure there not going to try a make shrapnel out of nicely sharpened carbide tooling.