The Power of Colaberation

[gcode]

https://www.mastercam.com/news/blog/collective-intelligence-an-insight-into-the-power-of-collaboration/

[TylerBeer]

That's cool - glad to see they extended the olive branch to competitive cam software

[JParis]

They are deciding how they are going to carve up and peel off pieces of Mastercam 

Just wild specualtion though 

[gcode]

They are deciding how they are going to carve up and peel off pieces of Mastercam 

Just wild specualtion though 

I doubt it, Mastercam has more licensed seats that all those other CAM systems combined.
I'm wondering if they will hook Mastercam and ICAM posts/machine sim together.
I bought an ICAM post when we first got our first Okuma horizontal 5X
The post really impressed me, but the price was breath taking and the service was unacceptable.

[crazy^millman]

I doubt it, Mastercam has more licensed seats that all those other CAM systems combined.
I'm wondering if they will hook Mastercam and ICAM posts/machine sim together.
I bought an ICAM post when we first got our first Okuma horizontal 5X
The post really impressed me, but the price was breath taking and the service was unacceptable.

This crazy person I know was their West Coast Representation until they got greedy and tried to make a possible sale a house account then the crazy person was no longer working with them.

[gcode]

I like their post, the kinematics awareness was amazing.
They treated Mastercam like a red headed step child though
The guy they assigned to be my support tech knew nothing about Mastercam, and didn't even have a seat
to use for post development. He would only work off an NCI file and even the simplest edits took weeks
I finally gave it up and switched to Postability.

[crazy^millman]

Yes they were trained in Mastercam and told they needed to use the NCI and Posted code to really tap into Mastercam, but the person that trained them was ignored for being a crazy person. I can think of only one 3rd Party that got NCI is not the final piece of the puzzle when posting NC doe from Mastercam. The MP.DLL is the missing part of the equation for all Posts. NCI is basic information for the math. MP.DLL does some work in the background ot take NCI with a Post to make good NC code. By tapping into the NCI and the outputted NC code then you could so anything and everything you wanted with ICAM. Now that Sandvik is pushing their Posting engine we will see how this all shakes out. CGTECH and ICAM were part of the convergence of the brain trusts, but too many CGTECH folks are NX fanbois and for the longest time snobbed me for being a Mastercam user. ICAM are CATAI fanbois and they also looked down on the Mastercam community. For both companies to have to lower their standards and be part of the meeting that Tolland at CNC Software I would have loved to Watch Sam and Jean Nichols from ICAM having to be there or some folks at CGTECH.     

[crazy^millman]

This is Sandvik's end game.

EV transmission producers and contractors can machine their components at Sandvik Coromant centers with power skiving on modern multi-task machines. Skilled and experienced staff are ready to support customers' future investments to achieve productive, efficient and flexible gear machining for EVs ― all in a single setup.

End Game

[TylerBeer]

One frustrating thing for 3rd party companies to work and support mastercam is the machine kinematics not being a fully baked thing, and the posts being written in/for MP and being an amalgamation of supreme legacy files with attempts to tie it into some modern stuff.

Needing to learn the foibles of MP, knowledge that is useless to anything outside of Mastercam is a tremendous time sink,  vs. kinematics &  posts that are written in python etc.


Hoity toity programmers see that and they snub their noses to it and they're not wrong at all, but they ignore that thousands of people have made it work because everything else in the software is so bloody practical.

[Jeff]

They are deciding how they are going to carve up and peel off pieces of Mastercam 

Just wild specualtion though 

I seriously doubt that. But anything can happen.
I think that Sandvik has a vision and a plan in mind to push forward. Probably the main reason why they've purchased all of those companies in recent years. They seem to be symbiotic with each other.

Now, if Sandvik could tell Walter to get a better website I might start ordering some stuff from them.

[mkd]

A shop I know wandered in the ICAM forest for a spell. Their posting thing took hours to poop out a program. To boot the crash protection wasn't satisfying either.
 Went back to Autodesk/vericut.

[CNCAppsJames]

NCI data is pretty rich in information. You've got to have a fair amount of knowledge and resources to glean what you need out of it though.

As I look at NCI data and think of ways to improve it, sure would be nice to switch over to something like XML which would be even more powerful and potentially more user friendly format IMHO.

[mkd]

Posting out of MC is a hot mess. Stupid post language

[CNCAppsJames]

Posting out of MC is a hot mess. Stupid post language

BITD when Mastercam's Post Language was develped it wasn't so bad. Many CNC Programmers had at least one Computer Programming language under their belt if not two or three. Today, that skill level isn't usually seen on our side of the fence anymore which makes for challenging self support, or reliance on 3rd Party Developers to come up with a better solution.

The Post Processor's language is "just" a combination of BASIC and C.

Today, I think a number of CAM systems have either moved on from proprietary file formats and migrated to something a little more standardized, or were developed in the last 5-10 years where Java, Python, etc... were better options than developing their own post language from scratch.

JM2CFWIW

[gcode]

In the predicted near future, you can take as long as you want grammin, because there's a 10x shortfall of copper on your eleccy vehicle production line....

true.. there is not enough copper in the whole world to build even 20% of the lunatic left's utopian electric dream world.