Been looking around online for resources, and one thing I’m coming up empty on is an up-to-date basic postprocessor for tormach machines.
Just to head it off at the pass, no, I can’t “just use fusion” for a number of reasons it’d take to long too get into.
We’re putting together a 1500MX right now, and the “official-unofficial” post that’s available for Tormach mills on Camworks based software hasn’t been updated since 2019. Doesn’t seem to support probing or MQL coolant.
I’m no stranger to post authoring/edits in UPG and Tormach does have reference materials available, I’m just wondering if there’s anything that’ll need less manual work/editing to get up and running with out there in the meantime, before I go down that road.
This isn’t the answer you’re looking for but my favorite post for simplicity and generous “trial” use is CamBam: http://cambam.info/
I have a post I’ve used but it was on an 1100M and we weren’t using a probe/etc through CAM. It likely doesn’t support the CAM features you’re after either (it’s got a pretty simple feature set, no 3D features besides ramp ins). What it IS is cheap, easy to configure/use, and a lifetime license.
I have tried to find a working alternative for the GoEngineer Solidworks CAM post, but haven’t found any, Unfortunately GoEngineer doesn’t provide any support or updates to their Tormach PathPilot post since it is “.a no charge free as is post”. I reported a few minor bugs in October 2022, they promised to fix these “as soon as possible”, but apparently it has not been possible in over 3 years.
You specify that you aren’t able to use Fusion for your application and/or are using another CAM with an older post that has not been updated. If I were you, I would grab anything that has already been put together for your CAM along with what has been proven out for Fusion or other CAM packages with more robust Tormach support, along with all the reference material for your CAM package as well as the Pathpilot reference material and anything else that is relevant to the task and stuff all of that in a Github repo with a README describing what each file is. Turn loose an AI coder (Claude, Codex, etc.) along with an AI plan to port from one to the other and see what it comes up with. I wouldn’t trust it blindly but I would certainly let it take a stab at it doing as much of the grunt work as possible.
Yeah, that’s been my experience as well. I’m just gonna have to spend some time or money getting one that does work. It is what it is.
Can’t do this for the same reason I can’t use fusion 360. There’s intellectual property and export restrictions involved, as well as significant investment in self-hosted PDM/versioning that makes adding things that don’t fit in the pipeline (or slurp up all your inputs with no restrictions on 3rd party use) difficult.
Luckily camworks’ UPG essentially does what you’re suggesting from the get-go. If I just make an overlay for the default linuxcnc profile according to the changes listed in the tormach gcode reference documents, it’ll probably get me 90% of the way there. The biggest difficulty in all likelihood is going to be getting the non-renishaw probes working, but that’s something I can work around in macros until we iron it out.
Thanks for sharing your constraints. Make sense as to why you can’t use Fusion or AI as suggested.
While it sounds like you have a solution, FWIW, you can self-host a Github repo as well as a standard or coding AI and agentic coding fairly easily these days with the various recipes that are available. Setting those up would still probably be less work than having to comb through lots of code by yourself…you may find there are other uses for a self-hosted AI to expedite your work…