[bluedemon]

Does anyone have the latest major point release yet?

[bluedemon]

FYI, in-case anyone is around....

We have made a few jumps up to the new version.

Pro's or new things that we like so far
A. Spiral is nice sometimes to have when using Z-Level climb/conventional.

B. The rougher automatically hits flat planes so you don't have to make and select planes. There are also some new smoothing options in roughing but we really don't know if they help much with our small parts.

C. Tool checking in-process for roughing. This is nice but slow as it is doing a lot of work. It shuts off planes where there is collisions. It would be nice if instead of stopping at that plane, tool path to continue on where it could. That is, instead of stopping the entire plane to due a particular detail.

C. There is a bee-hive time command but we don't have much use for it on our tools and have not been trying to utilize it.

Disappointments.
Mirroring/transforming is here but it drops copies of surfaces all through the database and makes it too messy. We are using out old method and looking forward to the next version as you will be able to pick surfaces by layer.


I would like to see a way to customize the created layer name of the mirrored program (layer) rather than the software just adding (mirror) or whatever it does that uses wildcards or some clever bit of code.

[bluedemon]

So far so good. I have spent a small amount of time with the new version and feel that it finally added the missing requirements to do some serious usable automation. Yes, it has some functions before but they never seemed useful for our particular needs.

I certainly have to be nice as our hard working reps will surely follow along, but need to mention my biggest issue. Expecting that this version will make a dramatic impact on our productivity, I feel we waited too long for it while corporate went off inventing new bits to sell. We purchased this software as it was the only one that could do our most difficult jobs but it never had the ability to quickly get through jobs that did not require the same user effort and time.

On that, my biggest insult will be that it is finally as good as 10 year old Work NC back when we evaluated them. Well, in ability to automate but WNC, Powermill and some others crumbled on our more complex work.

I will follow up with a more detailed post of the significant improvements as my time permits and hopefully after some training.