Installing FlatCam

FlatCAM is useful for turning Gerber or Drill files from PCB software into G-Code for a CNC (or svg for a laser cutter)
The existing self installing version of flatcam is quite old (around 2016).
so below I’ve tried to details the minimum set of steps needed to get it working from source.

Installing Python

First we need to make sure python 2.7 is installed on the system. For windows I’d recommend the 64bit version of python 2.7 from
https://www.python.org/downloads/

Installing PyQt4

One of the things FlatCam uses is QT4 for python. This is fairly easy to install under windows
First go to this address

• https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pyqt4

If your looking for the python 2.7 / 64bit windows file then this will likley be something like PyQt4-4.11.4-cp27-cp27m-win_amd64.whl
To install it into python 2.7

C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe install PyQt4-4.11.4-cp27-cp27m-win_amd64.whl

Installing pypiwin32

One thing we also need is pypiwin32 under windows, to install this run the following from the command line

C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe install pypiwin32

I found on my system I had to force it to re-install for some reason, so if you run into problems running flatcam you may want to try

C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe install --upgrade --force-reinstall pypiwin32

Download sources of Flatcam

Next we need to download the source code of flatcam.
One way is to just download the below zip file and extract it into a directory somewhere

• https://bitbucket.org/jpcgt/flatcam/get/master.zip

Another way if you can use git is to run the following at a command line

git clone https://bitbucket.org/jpcgt/flatcam

Running Flatcam

Next to try running flatcam

cd flatcam
C:\Python27\python flatcam