Bob La Londe wrote:

On 4/22/2011 5:58 AM, Pete C. wrote:

"John R. Carroll" wrote:

Pete C. wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote:

Pete C. wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote:

The blocks are glued and clamped, they should be ready tomorrow
afternoon. I need to eventually find some affordable 3D CAM software
as well as a good simulator. The problem of course is that all I do is
really hobby stuff, so I can't justify really expensive stuff.

There is about $70K worth of software and hardware focused on this.
Haha!

I think there are a couple of software products around that could programm
these parts for free.
I'll see if I have the original release of FreeMill around somewhere.
Ir was easy, worked OK and the price was right.

You'd still need a modeller but there again, you could use Rhino or one of
it's many clones.
Hobby guys seem to love it.

--
John R. Carroll



I've got TurboCAD Pro V17, so I should be ok on the CAD end, other than
learning more of the 3D end of it beyond what I've been doing. It's the
CAM end I need to upgrade beyond SheetCAM, and of course finding a good
simulator.

110 pounds for SheetCam? That does seem a little pricey for 2.5D CAM.
Its 149 dollars for CamBam and it does decent 3D 3 axis CAM. Not great,
but not bad, and its 2D / 2.5D is impeccable with some really nice
features for nesting multiple parts in the newest release. Its even
starting to implement some rudimentary speed feed stuff. Also you can
download and try the latest version totally for free. Its 40 executions
limited (which is better than time limited in my opinion) so you can set
it down if you get busy and get back to a project weeks later, and you
haven't lost any of your demo time. It is not crippled in anyway.
There is also a free version, but the free version is strictly 2.5D. I
don't think the free version is all that great, but its free. LOL.
Anyway, don't waste your time downloading the free version. Just
download the latest full release. When I did I made a lot of parts
during my demo period.

On the flip side SheetCam does look like clean basic CAM for 2.5D.

On the flip / flip side you did get working code for your application
even faster by using RCM CAM. LOL. It takes a little while to learn
everything in CamBam, but it is beginning to become quite capable of
some fairly complex work.

I've got FreeMill now and will be looking at it and trying to learn it
as time permits. It appears it should do the job once I learn it.

As for SheetCAM, it has worked nicely for the plasma and milling I've
done up to now. It's probably been helpful learning CAM stuff on 2.5D to
keep it simple.