Alphacam???

I am interested in everyones opinion on Alphacam.
Does anyone use it and what do they think????

I use it....inherited it. Went to buy another seat (growth) and the reps here in the states irritated me to the point of buying BobCad and making it work just to spite the people at AlphaCam. No posterior kissing on this end to purchase someone's overpriced product. Product isn't bad, understand....but I will spend our money elsewhere. Hope you have better luck across the pond, believe that's the origin.

That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it!!!

I work as a CNC Programmer and operater for a furniture company. All I ever use at work for the programming is AlphaCam 7.5 and AutoCad. I have been using it for almost four years, I really like the software and don't have very many complaints about it.

4 year AlphaCam user, it worked well for me, many features, good support.

I'm pretty new to the world of CNC I just started 8 months ago. I had a 3 day training program on alphacam without doing any physical tests on a CNC. I had it running smoothly within a week and our company will never look back ;) But I find it a very useful and simple program. It's extremely powerful when it comes to panel processing as you have complete control of it's nesting capabilities. I use it mostly for panel processing but I'm now branching into fancy detail work in solid and it's going extremely well. The machine styles tools are amazing, I only have manually program something once and save it. Then it's easy as drag and droping on geometry.

My machine is a 3 Axis 4x8 omnitech with a fanuc controller.

One other plus is the fact I have yet to run into any glitchs or have had any problems with it. Which is always nice as it lets you focus on getting your work done.

It is excellent software, although drawing in 3D is painfully slow compared to products like Rhino. I've used alphacam daily since 1989 and kept upgrading every year at great expense. However in recent years I've found them quite arrogant to deal with, so dropped off the upgrade scheme. Just my experience perhaps ?

Tom,

I've used AlphaCAM ver 2 for 4 years and we just upgraded to ver 8. It's a love -hate relationship. Great functionality (love), not all applets remember last entries so have to repeat typing (hate). Don't expect to learn much from the HELP menu (hate). Unless your exceptional, the only way to learn is through their class or from a learned user. Windoor is powerful and a huge timesaver if it suits your application.

John

John
How long have you been using WinDoor. We are buying a seat and some feed back about usability and the process for creating the configured parts and assemblies would be great thanks.
DarkSparc

I attended WinDoor classes 3 weeks ago. Have yet to use it for a revenue project. However the dry runs look great. Exponential increase in productivity. Once you have your "master" programmed, outputting different size cabinets (and other assemblies) in different quantities with different options takes only a few minutes and you have all your materials nested and tooled and labels to print. However I can't see anyone learning it without being taught by a medium to expert user. Not that it's difficult to learn, but it is not intuitive. If it is the correct product for your type of production, you will be amazed at the timesaving.

John

Greetings,
I have been using AlphaCAM since 1998. It is very powerful. It does have a fairly steep learning curve. The V8 version finally has a real help file that is actually helpful. This version is among the more stable versions they have put out. Some of the strong points include tool styles, user defined tools, and several methods of automating repetitive tasks. There is the old text based macros, which are not "supported" anymore, but if you are familiar with the software, then it is easy to write text macro. The text macros are limited in capabilities, and some features they do not work very well, however, they do allow for reading and writing to/from a CSV database. A second method, which has all the AlphaCAM staff overly pleased with themselves, is the Visual Basic Interface. This allows writing macros, DLLs, and exe's in Visual Basic (VB6 I believe), which can run inside of AlphaCAM. This API also permits outside programs to call AlphaCAM and various part of it. This is reportedly an awesome capability, assuming that you are versed in VB6, and learn to navigate around in the ACAM properties and methods pool.

From personal experience, I would agree with John Klemmer regarding the Love/Hate relationship. AlphaCAM is very good at a lot of things, but it does have some idiosyncrasies that can cause migraines.

As AlphaCAM is owned by Planit, and they own a number of other cabinet related software packages, there is opportunity to interface with other software more easily than with many other choices.

AlphaCAM is a pricey piece of software. Whether or not it fits your needs is not determinable base on your initial inquiry.

Prior to version 7 or so, my opinion was that they wasted too many resources adding bells and whistles and not enough on fixing bugs and core functionality, including an abysmal help file. Now, with V8, I think they have pretty well gotten their act together. V8 has some great features both for a (relatively) repetitive environment like a cabinet shop, and extreme flexibility for a job shop like mine. So, my opinion is that it is a good product for CNC router applications. Since you can have as many posts as you want, you can use one software package to support any number of different machines (withing practical limits). As I have been immersed in AlphaCAM for so long, I am reluctant to change horses for that and other reasons, including the fact that it works well for me.

does anyone know how to get the RhinoIFJP (the Rhino Interface add-in) to work in alphaCAM 7.5?

I am trying to learn alphaCAM on my own and am struggling with the cumbersome interface limitations - although I have no idea what the RhinoIFJP will do I have read threads and posts on other sites claiming it can plug-in the Rhino work interface into AlphaCAM which would be awesome...

any ideas?

Been using Alphacam for 3 years. Used MasterCam for 5 years prior. I like AlphaCam better. Has a lot of features that one can learn on your own. It is very user friendly if you are used to using the computer to draw or import drawings then it's very easy to create tool paths and get the job done. Right now I'm doing Crown Molding Trim for some Ellipticle windows and it is looking fantastic.....good luck in your search and decision.

I've been using alphacam now for 13 years.

I don't think there is anything on the market thats as good.
Especially now with the feature extraction.

Being able to get hold of designers 3d models and extract the features from the model which creates the geometries without a drawing office having to touch anything is awsome.
It could save companies millions of pounds.

Shaun

How much is it to purchase Alphacam? Single user.

Depends on which version, but it probably starts between $3000-$5000, and annual maintenance is about $800-$1000.

I was recently offered a special upgrade price to go from V7.5 to current with 1 year maintenance, and it was about $2500 if I recall correctly.

Ive been using Alphacam for about 4 years. Its very capable, but I figured out about a year ago that I can draw 3d parts far faster and easier in Rhino.

More recently I have learned that toolpathing the 3d stuff is also far simpler in RhinoCam.

I still use Alphacam for all of my 2d nesting operations that come from our cabinet software, and it does a great job......but its no longer my choice for the 3d stuff we need.

It irked me considerably when they decided to change a bunch of the icons a while back. Maybe there is a way use the newer version and still retain the old icons, but I haven't bothered to look for it. We opted out of the maintenance program and I just use the 7.5.

I have found Planit to be a major pain in the ass to deal with. I have never been able to speak to someone directly. You have to call, leave a message.....then wait for a response, which usually is an email or a fax and seldom the same day. I guess that works OK if you have very specific questions, but when trying to debug something that may have many causes, its a nightmare.

I installed CabinetVison and did the machine integrations for a few local shops that didn't want to spend the ridiculous amount of money that Planit wanted to perform the integration. ($5000.00) I wasted an incredible amount of time playing cat and mouse with Planit to receive the access codes which should have already been supplied to the owners that purchased the software, but still saved them about $3500.00. They really don't like people sidestepping their exorbitant fees.

That's just my experience.....maybe I was just unlucky.

If you are on Planit's maintenance plan, you can register on their portal and get support response within an hour these days, aswell as managing licenses, downloads, support cases etc. its brilliant!

I have found that if you do invest in Planit and the product properly, it can be personalised and developed and streamlined - to do amazing things. Problems tend to go away when you get everyone trained up to know all the little, shortcuts and macros and best practises.