[rlockwood]

I fed SW my sob story about being a small two man company and they basically said Man up. No discount for the little guy. Turbocad it is then. I have managed with it so far, so it's cheap to keep.

Oh, yeah. I meant HSMWorks.

[MichaelHenry]

Any idea how that combination compares with BobCAD/CAM? I've been playing with BobCAD/CAM the last few days as well. I can see it has a lot of very nice capabilities, but wrapped in a complex, convoluted, and not at all intuitive UI. I bet it takes at least 2X as many mouse clicks to do most operations in BobCAD as it does in Alibre. In four hours I was able to learn enough Alibre to be able to model all the parts for the PDB, and build a complete PDB assembly. In four hours playing with BobCAD, I'm still not to the point of knowing enough to model more than the very simplest PDB parts, and there are some pretty basic operations, like translation (i.e. - moving entities), that have me completely baffled. And on the CAM side, I've so far only been able to make it create a lot of horrendously wrong toolpaths....

Regards,
Ray L.

Sorry Ray, I've never used BoBCADCAM and only played a bit with an early version of AlibreCAM. My understanding, possibly mistaken is that the CAD in BobCADCAM is mostly just a tool to supplement the CAM function.

I did look at VM used by a friend for his Taig; it was the basic version and seemed reasonably well done and fairly easy to work with. I decided against AlibreCAM because the basic version would not allow you to change WCS for the part, which I use often to machine different sides of parts (hope I didn't mess up nomenclature there). In the standard version of AC there is no facility to easily rotate the part by 180° along X or Y to machine the back of the part or by 90° to machine a side. The workaround is to do some sort of Boolean Unite or something in Alibre and save the result as a new file and that was a deal killer for me. The Pro version of AC (and VM) does allow changing axis orientation of the WCS but that's a lot more money, something like $2-3k.

I instead opted for SprutCAM, which as you probably know Tormach sells pretty inexpensively if you buy one of their mills. The version I got does (now) continuous 4th/5th axis as well as lathe work and does handle re-orienting the axes on the part. The downside is that SprutCAM is not integrated so that a change in the part design requires re-importing the part. If the change is minor, like changing hole spacing, the post can be regenerated very quickly. The work involved in SprutCAM for design changes progresses in complexity from there depending on the number and type of changes.

The other downside to SprutCAM is it can be a bit flaky and was fairly difficult to learn, for me at least. I had no CAM or CNC experience at all before so someone like you may take to it like a duck to water. The manual is extensive (600+? pages) but is apparently translated from Russian which can present it's own form of challenges. Eric Anderson at Tormach provides support and has uploaded a number of tutorials to YouTube which you should look at if you have any interest in SC. Sprut does make available frequent updates and their new Version 8 apparently checks home for new updates. There is a 30-day trial, I think, available from:

SprutCAM America - Home

I think that the price for folks that don't own Tormach mills varies between $900 and $3600 depending on feature set, like EDM, jet cutting, lathe ops, 3D, 4th/5th axis work, etc. From what I could tell it is pretty tough to beat the cost/benefit ratio so long as you find the software productive and easy to use.

Mike

[BAMCNC.COM]

AlibreCam is basically the same as RhinoCam, which is what I use. I've tried other CAM packages and nothing is as easy as RhinoCam that I've found. Spend an hour on YouTube and your good to go for the most part.

[SCzEngrgGroup]

I'd love to have SolidWorks, but it's way out of my price range. I did do a 30-day demo of SprutCAM, maybe 18 months ago, and found it rather unstable, and very hard to learn (even after watching many of the Tormach videos). It seems to work really well once you've gone through the pain of learning it, but one of my tests of any new software is whether or not I can be doing useful work with it in the first hour. That gives a good indication of how intuitive the UI is. SprutCAM failed that test. BobCAD is teetering on the edge.

"HSMWorms" :-) looks really nice for the price ($0). But the high cost of SolidWorks more than makes up the difference in cost, I guess.

The CAM in BobCAD looks to be quite capable, it has a number of features I've been wanting for some time, and it does appear to be reasonably well integrated into the CAD. How stable it is, I'm not sure. I did crash both BobCAD and the Predator CNC Editor that comes with it in my first hour of use. It's primarily the CAD UI that seems well short of optimal to me. The capabilities are all there, and some nice capabilities at that, but the UI is kinda bizarre in a lot of places.

I'll probably end up doing a demo of AlbireCAM/VisualMill. I do REALLY like the parametric modeling aspect of Alibre. Trouble is, all my existing designs are done in 2D CAD as DXFs, and my current CAM (SheetCAM) is 2.5D. So, going to a "real" 2D/3D CAM would be quite a bit of work, to port the active designs, and do the mountain of customization I've done on the CAM side - I have a custom post-post-processor that reads parses, modified, and re-writes the G-code after the CAM generates it, to customize it for my machine, and my work-flow. It would be painful to give that up, but also painful to duplicate it with another CAM.

Regards,
Ray L.

[BAMCNC.COM]

I do almost everything in 2D in Rhino, do all Cam with RhinoCam and even made my own post processor for Tormach ATC in RhinoCam. It's all very easy. For the Price of Rhino I think its a very good deal.

[rlockwood]

I do almost everything in 2D in Rhino, do all Cam with RhinoCam and even made my own post processor for Tormach ATC in RhinoCam. It's all very easy. For the Price of Rhino I think its a very good deal.

Delete some PM's, your box is full

[SCzEngrgGroup]

This morning I made the final PDB parts with the sensors integrated, and they look great, and work perfectly. The new, sensor'd PDB is now mounted on my Torus Pro, replacing the first prototype that's been running there for about 3 months now. All that's left now is finalizing the electronics and firmware. Sadly, the Gods are not being kind in that area. I had hoped to have the firmware for the sensors fully integrated today, and maybe even get the true spindle speed display going. Instead, I had to spend most of the day trying to get the old code to compile, download, and run correctly. My PC went Tango-Uniform a few weeks ago (HDD failure), and I was forced to buy a new one, which, sadly, has Windows 8. I have one word of advice for anyone considering buying a Windows 8 PC - DON'T! It has been a monumental nightmare.

First, the machine itself, and Asus Q500A laptop, has had a few "issues". The touchpad was flaky as can be. After trying all kinds of drivers and different things, I finally decided the hardware needed to be swapped out. Asus flat-out refused to even SELL me a replacement touchpad! I have NEVER experienced that before with ANY computer manufacturer! So, I found a used one on EBay, from an earlier Asus model, and swapped it in. But, in the process of taking the machine apart, I discovered to my horror, the factory had stripped several of the threaded inserts that accept the screws that hold the case together. So, the entire upper half of the main case needs to be replaced, on a brand-new almost $1000 laptop! Asus, again, refused to sell me the part, offering only to have me ship the machine several states away to their repair facility. No thanks. I've continued to have touchpad problems, albeit at a greatly reduced rate, until yesterday, when I found a slightly newer driver had been released. That driver seems to have finally resolve the last of my touchpad problems (well, other than the ones that are inherent in the unusual design of this particular touchpad).

Anyway, back to the wonders of Win8.... Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to change EVERYTHING, just because they could. Almost nothing is where it used to be, and almost nothing is called what it used to be. Incredibly, even fundamental functions, like keyboard cut and paste, no longer work quite like they used to! And, there are software incompatibilties galore, so I've had to update most of my software. I had to switch to a different development environment for the firmware, and it's taken hours to get everything setup and working right. The MCU board is programmed over a USB adaptor that appears to the system as a virtual COM port, but the USB chip used in that adaptor, as it turns out, is not 100% compatible with Win8. So, I had to spend several hours today figuring out what the problem was, and building a Frankenstein adaptor that DOES work. But now, while the firmware compiles and downloads without error, it does not run correctly. So far, I've discovered the real-time clock is not working correctly, and I suspect that's not all. Since the firmware is completely event-driven, based on real-time clock interrupts, pretty much nothing works, other than the LCD display.

I hate days like this....

Regards,
Ray L.

[SCzEngrgGroup]

Well.... BobCad/CAM is not going well for me. I really like the CAM integration and simulation, but in both the CAD and the CAM, I'm finding it surprisingly easy to do things that cause the whole app to crash. In one case, it didn't crash, but locked up the whole PC, and I had to do a forced shut-down and re-boot. Very disappointing. It seems to happen most often when computing toolpaths, but I've also crashed it importing other 3D formats (STEP, IGES, etc.), and once just drawing something in CAD. I am starting to understand the CAM, and can see a lot of very nice functionality there. I was thinking it might be possible to do the design in Alibre, export to some common format, and import into BobCAD so I can use the CAM, but so far that's not looking promising. Even when I first save the imported file in BobCAD, in it's own proprietary format, then re-open it to do the CAM. There could still be something I'm doing wrong but that shouldn't cause the thing to just crash. I recall something similar happened when I first use Alibre about 5 years ago - at first, i had terrible problems with it crashing, then it started behaving much better. I never did figure out why, but I have to believe there was something I was doing that provoked one or more bugs, and after I got more familiar with it, I stopped doing whatever it was.

Regards,
Ray L.

[UniqueMachining]

Ray

I too recently upgraded my laptop. After reviewing all the box store offerings (Win 8), I went to the local computer store and ordered a slightly customized one.

Toshiba S875D
AMD A10-4600M APU
Ratheon HD Graphics 2.3 GHz
8 GB
256 SSD *** Most responsible for blazing response *** ($250.00 +/- by itself)
Win 7 Pro 64 Bit
Rating 6.7
Boot time fully loaded 15 sec.
Price $1027.00
With everything else being so fast today, it appears the hard drive is the bottleneck .
Surfing CNCZone is no longer painfully slow. Also updated last mill (NM-200 Series 1) to a SSD. You could hear (or perhaps more correctly, not hear) the difference.
Smoothed it right out. Can only assume it was able to feed the mill faster and more evenly. Mini smooth stepper emulator?

As to Visual Mill, I have just begun to experiment. VM will accept .dxf files and it appears they are easier to work with than 3d.
In Alibre, save your file as AutoCAD.dxf and open in VM. If you are using 2.5d vs. 3d you must enter the depth of cuts. So far that is the extent of my VM knowledge.

John

[SCzEngrgGroup]

John,

I'll be very interested in hearing how you like VM after you've used it for a while.

Regards,
Ray L.

[Hirudin]

I used RhinoCAM before switching over to SolidCAM. Although it would get the job done I found the UI to be inconsistent and sometimes the paths it generated were very inefficient.

I started a thread on the RhinoCAM forum asking why a rectangular pocket was filled with numerous, seemingly random rapids going every-which-way. In short order I was banned from their forum. That was likely the straw that broke the camel's back. At this point I haven't even installed it for at least a couple years.

Maybe by this point the Visual Mill derivatives are amazing. The problems I had weren't insurmountable and, if the programmers were willing to acknowledge they existed, could probably be fixed easily enough.

Good luck with finding a CAM program that's worth a damn! It's an uphill battle.

[AUSTINMACHINING]

FWIW,

I use Solidworks and Inventor daily. I've used Inventor since it came out, and Solidworks for the last couple years. I ended up with Solidworks due to a client directive to design in their preferred format. When it came time to get a CAM system, The Mastercam dealer would not offer any demo's or even much information. Being new to machining, I wanted some "feel" for what I was getting into. HSMworks were very supportive and gave me a 30 day demo of the full blown package. They even made me a post processor for my old round column mill. So I've been using HSMworks for a couple years and it is a great product with great support. The post processor is written in Java and very easy to modify. So that's the good...

The Bad,
HSMworks is great, but Solidworks is archaic and buggy IMO. I can design twice as fast in Inventor. The work flow is much more seamless without the crashes and odd behavior.

The future:
Autodesk bought out HSMworks 5-6 months back. Kind of odd that they purchased a product that only runs in their competitors platform. They continue to support Soildworks (at least for now). Their is rumor of Inventor/HSMworks integration in the fall.

All these packages are $$$. I have corporate $$ to use them, otherwise I would be looking for one of the solutions listed in this thread. IF I were to spend my own $$ on these high end packages, Inventor/HSMworks would be the "Bees Knees" IMO.

[BAMCNC.COM]

Win 8 is better, have you hit the ESC key yet?


PM's deleted

[SCzEngrgGroup]

Win 8 is better, have you hit the ESC key yet?


PM's deleted

Huh? Don't know what you're referring to....

Regards,
Ray L.

[SCzEngrgGroup]

Well, the good news is, I think I have the firmware working again. I'd made one change in the hardware, to change from a parallel-interface LCD to a serial-interface LCD. I had to do this because the MCU board I'm using for the production version has limited I/O. Something in the LCD driver code does not like running in an interrupt context. I'll dig into that another time. For now, I've just moved the PCD updates to the foreground loop, and things now appears to be working again. I have to do a bit more wiring to be able to test it with the PDB attached.

Regards,
Ray L.

[BAMCNC.COM]

Huh? Don't know what you're referring to....

Regards,
Ray L.

When win 8 boots up, you have a worthless tiled screen right? Hit the ESC key and you now have win 7 back.

[SCzEngrgGroup]

When win 8 boots up, you have a worthless tiled screen right? Hit the ESC key and you now have win 7 back.

VERY first thing I did was install a freeware app (Pokki) that puts something very much like the Windows Start menu back, so my machine boots right into the desktop, not the moronic "Modern" UI. I have as much of the Win8 garbage as possible turned off (I've disabled all the things that pop up when you move the mouse to the edges or corners of the screen etc.). But it is still seriously different from ANY previous version of Windows in countless ways, some minor, some really major. Every day I find some new difference that has me scratching my head and wondering WTF they were thinking....

Regards,
Ray L.

[rlockwood]

VERY first thing I did was install a freeware app (Pokki) that puts something very much like the Windows Start menu back, so my machine boots right into the desktop, not the moronic "Modern" UI. I have as much of the Win8 garbage as possible turned off (I've disabled all the things that pop up when you move the mouse to the edges or corners of the screen etc.). But it is still seriously different from ANY previous version of Windows in countless ways, some minor, some really major. Every day I find some new difference that has me scratching my head and wondering WTF they were thinking....

Regards,
Ray L.

Yep, the new laptop I bought for design work has 8 on it. I keep telling myself I need to just get used to it. IMO, they abandoned the one thing they'd managed to do right over the years-- keeping things consistent.

[BAMCNC.COM]

I'm not following. Those freeware/spyware/do nothing apps will do nothing but slow you pc down. Stock brand new Windows 8 machine, when its boots up hit ESC, nothing else needs done. Win 8 is soooo much better in ways its hard to explain. I have an Acer Predator and it came with win 8, I was pissed right away and hit esc for no apparent reason, well... Now its windows 7 more or less, I slowly figured out the other GUI (windows tiles) over all it takes about 2 days to realize its potential.

[rlockwood]

I'm not following. Those freeware/spyware/do nothing apps will do nothing but slow you pc down. Stock brand new Windows 8 machine, when its boots up hit ESC, nothing else needs done. Win 8 is soooo much better in ways its hard to explain. I have an Acer Predator and it came with win 8, I was pissed right away and hit esc for no apparent reason, well... Now its windows 7 more or less, I slowly figured out the other GUI (windows tiles) over all it takes about 2 days to realize its potential.

Eh, i'm down to just a few things that bug me. For the record, i'm with you on the freeware-- I havent taken that step, i'd rather just deal with the annoyances, as i'm certain i'll eventually get used to it.

Still not sure what's up with the tile programs. It took me a month to figure out how to close the PDF I made the mistake of opening. Some things seem useful, but the vast majority of it is simply not intuitive.

Most modern tech companies seem to be guilty of much the same thing, changing things just to change them; more often there isn't a whole lot of productivity gained, and it often annoys their user base enough to drive them to try out the competition.