All in all, no reason for hard feelings.Īccording to Andrew Mustun, an open source version of QCAD 3 was also planned and would have made perfect sense from a community perspective as well as a business perspective: Reportedly, there have been few patches and more other kinds of contributions - translations, CAD part library items, fonts, hatch patterns. The lack of strong opinions on the matter could partially be explained by the lack of source code contributions. Andrew says that feedback about QCAD, the QCAD community edition and the business model was mostly positive with very few negative voices. The final release of QCAD 3.0 followed in summer 2012.īefore you ask, according to Ribbonsoft, the whole idea of mixing the open source and the closed source business models wasn’t exactly controversial. The community edition was years old by the time. It was the first new public release of QCAD since late 2009. Indeed, around 2009 the company started rewriting QCAD and released the first public beta version of QCad v3.0 in August 2011. According to Andrew, the time gap between them was usually about a year, and it increased while the lead developer was working on QCAD 3, since there was nothing new to release during that period of completely rewriting QCAD. The difference between commercial and free versions was mostly about amount of features and the date of availability. QCAD is a CAD system for Windows, Mac and Linux, created by Ribbonsoft and available in two editions: the commercial one and the free one called Community Edition (GPLv2). As if recent LibreDWG story wasn’t quite sufficient, the most recent news is that Ribbonsoft is not going to release Community Edition of QCAD right now. However, there is a straightforward template you can use for all configuration files.įor our example, the definition of the class MyGCode looks like this (note that lines starting with // are comments and are not required): // Include GCodeBase.It’s quite disturbing how much controversy a small software niche can get in a relatively small timeframe. How this works exactly is beyond the scope of this documentation. While there are strictly speaking no classes in ECMAScript, we can create a similar concept by attaching functions to the prototype object of a constructor function. MyGCode.js must define a class called MyGCode to be a valid configuration for QCAD/CAM. You can use your favourite plain text editor to create and write the file, for example Notepad under Windows, TextEdit under macOS or vim, Emacs, etc. MyGCode.js under directory postprocessors of your QCAD/CAM installation. For this example, we call our new configuration MyGCode and store it in a file with the same name, i.e. Deriving a Configuration from GCodeBaseĬreate a file with a unique name of your choice. One such example configuration for outputting G-Code in Millimeters is defined in file GCodeMM.js and available in the user interface as the configuration called G-Code (G41/G42). This is the case for most machine controllers. G1 X10 Y20 for a linear movement), the configuration can be derived from the existing configuration for G-Code called GCodeBase, which is defined in file GCodeBase.js. If the desired output is a G-Code dialect (e.g. This text stream is exposed through the member variable this.stream. CamExporterV2 offers a text stream ( QTextStream) to write to the exported file. CamExporterV2 also takes care of the various features of QCAD/CAM, for example tool radius compensation, lead in / lead out, cutting inner contours before outer contours, path optimization, etc.ĬamExporterV2 does not output anything by itself, but would produce an empty file on its own. Various methods in CamExporterV2 are called to export the file header, the various entities in the CAD drawing and the footer. CamExporterV2 defines the basic structure of CAM exporter configuration classes. The ECMAScript class must derive directly or indirectly from class CamExporterV2, which is defined by QCAD/CAM. If the script file is called MyGCode.js, the class defined inside the script must be called MyGCode. Basic StructureĮach configuration file contains an ECMAScript class with the same name as the script file. New format implementations can be added to the same location. All available configurations are stored inside the directory postprocessors. Each supported CAM format is defined in a configuration file (or "postprocessor") which is an ECMAScript (JavaScript) file that implements the format details. These formats can be dialects of G-Code or other, completely different formats. QCAD/CAM can export CAD drawings to various formats used in CAM (computer-aided manufacturing).
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