Its been a very enlightening week. I forgot to get some stuff and have figured out a pipeline to get information from one end to the other. Main thing I forgot was a way to hold the work down to the table. It took me a while to find a clamping kit that would fit the TAIG mill, so I'll share it here to save others time.

http://littlemachineshop.com/product...18&category=11

Its already here and it fits and works great. I also bought some end mills and a Keyocera .02" engraver bit. Between the workbench, mill, Deepgrove controller and steppers, end mills, clamping kit, and engraver I've spent about $2,000. With the cost of the computer its about $2,500 but already had the computer around. So if you see the $1,700 price tag think about the extras that you'll need too.

As for the data pipeline I use high end visual effects software (Houdini) at work and already know my way around it. Through PyCAM I've found a way to get geometry out of Houdini and make a tool path from it (full 3D, not just 2D). Awesome! Same thing could be done with Houdini Apprentice which is free, or Blender which is similar and open source. CAD software is probably the ideal, but since I don't know the first thing about CAD this is perfect for me.



On a side note, would anyone be interested in a tutorial for that computer graphics software to PyCAM pipeline or maybe EMC? I'd like to give back to the community since I've learned so much and made use of the open source software out there. Cheers!