Abstract
3D-CAD education has been offered since 2006 in the department of mechanical engineering at Gunma College of Technology, and within 2012, a five-axis controlled machining center will be introduced for student education. So, it is needed further to develop the comprehensive practices in CAD/CAM education.
We have supposed that both FreeCAD (PC-based free 3D-CAD software) and Mach3 (PC-based CNC machine control software) would help students to understand CAD/CAM technologies with a review of mathematical topics and machine control. In this report, we discuss the applicability of these application programs. FreeCAD is a general purpose CAD software easy to access from Python built-in interpreter, while, Mach3 is a CNC software that communicates motion control signals through a printer port, and also has a built in scripting engine. Then, we prepared many script programs which are used for 3D modeling, machine operation, custom M-code creation, and tool path generation, as exercises in CAD/CAM education.
