Open Source Fab Lab

=What is an Open Source Fab Lab+

Existing Work

http://www.appropedia.org/Callooh

Software

Message from Sam:

Marcin, I am in transit right now. But, a quick reply:

Although it is extremely difficult to learn to use, http://www.brlcad.org/ is the most robust that I have tried this far.

http://www.qcad.org/qcad.html is also really nice for 2D CAD work.

http://www.linuxcnc.org/ looks awesome, but is only an "Enhanced Machine Controller", and doesn't provide CAD drawing, nor CAM toolpaths (G-code drawing). What it does is interpret g-code toolpaths to move the actual XYZ table, or whatever machine you are controlling.

So, linuxcnc is essential, but as I have no machines to run yet, i have not had much of a way to test it out.

Also, for non-commercial use http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/fab/ (cam.py and cad.py) those are some simple but useful software programs both cad drawing and cam toolpath generation (but are not fully open source, as we discussed earlier)

I am still searching for other software, but you can really do a lot with brl-cad and q-cad.

I still want to try http://www-rocq.inria.fr/OpenFEM/ and http://avocado-cad.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.cademia.org/frontend/index.php?sub=29 and http://www.opencascade.org/ don't know anything about those yet.

BRL-CAD

If you plan on trying to use BRL-CAD, the PDF's on this page are essential reading http://www.brlcad.org/wiki/Documentation

BRL-CAD Industry Diagram