Home Machinist's Journal

Hello

Most CAD-CAM programs are complicated and difficult to use. After I bought a CNC milling machine I started looking for a simple Cam program to work with my milling machine. I found this on a German website. It is called EstlCam. It can be used for 2D and 3D operations. In 2D it can be used with a number of files such as the classic DXF file and in 3D with an STL file. In the program there is a list of the most common postprocessors.
You can also easily make a postprocessor for your machine yourself. The program is initially in German and English but other languages are also available. You can download the program from the site www.estlcam.de and use it without restrictions but after a certain time the loading and saving of files becomes slow.
The program costs only $59.

Below is a part that I made in 3D with it.

I looked up estlcam on YouTube and found a decent amount of videos, including some tutorials.
I watched a couple of them and, according to the video posters, noted a couple things.
1. One video stated estlcam was purely a CAM program.
2. It was original designed and built for CNC router use.

It would be interesting to hear if this is actually the case or if things have changed.
One other thing stated on a video I watched was that he had issues importing CAD files generated using AutoCAD. It could be done, but was described as "Glitchy".

As I wrote in the Subject title and, as you also noted, Estlcam is a pure CAM program with which you can in a very simple way generate a G-code file to control a milling machine.

When you create a drawing in AUTOCAD you have to export this drawing to a .DXF /.SVG /.PLT /.STL file to open in Estlcam. From other programs you can also use .PNG /.GIF /. JPG files.

You can download Estlcam for free and test it for quite some time without restrictions. There is a help text for almost every operation. :D

Welcome aboard Gerard!  Glad to see that you figured out how to post and add photos!  

If you get time, feel free to post a short introduction about yourself over in the Welcome Center (https://www.homemachinistsjournal.com/index.php?topic=254.0) where I already started a thread for you.