MapleCAM is a desktop CAM application I built for my LongMill CNC router. It's written in Java, generates G-code for GRBL and LinuxCNC, and handles routing, laser, and V-carving operations. It runs on Linux, requires no cloud account, and is free to download.

I use my CNC for a lot of things, but a surprising number of them end up requiring V-carving for text. V-carving turned out to be the operation that took the most work to get right — not just the toolpath generation itself, but writing two custom libraries and a six-phase optimizer to get there. This post is about that process: what I tried, what failed, and how the pieces eventually came together.