Help me select a cam package
I am a hobby machinist for more than 10 years now, having built a couple routers and a retrofit. I use Mach3 with Sheetcam at home. For work I ran a few drawing though it for engraving and now they want to buy a cam package. Sheetcam falls a bit short for my work use in the following. We use Inventor and models have to be saved to views in dxf format and then features all need their own layer. We can do this and have done it but it is a hassle. Most of what we make is 2.5 d work but some 3d would open doors up. The 2.5 d stuffs needs to have pocketing with both roughing and finish passes for both the profile and depth. We are also doing a lot more engraving, a simple way to add text for engraving directly in the cam package would be great. I can get most of this stuff done with what we have but it is no benefit if the machist can run though a conversational programming routine on the machine faster that producing the cam output from a cam package. We have some money to spend but would like to keep to around 1k or less. We are an educational institution so we may be able to get a discount, but we would be using the cam software for research related projects in our lab. I know this is opinion based but I am open to suggestions. Thanks.
