I'm also an Alibre user. Some years ago I got the free version of Alibre Express. I found it to be just what I needed -- until they "upgraded" it. Then it stopped supporting creation of two dimensional drawings from 3-D models.
I recently bought the current version ($97 I think) before they required that you buy the one year maintenance. It is an excellent product. The free CAM version doesn't support 2-D profiling. The only output mode it seems to support is a raster scan where it moves up and down on the Z axis. It does support outputting DXF files. The free version of CAMBAM can input those files and generate just what I need. (I think that's the way I made the combination work -- it's been a while.) Ken On 3/23/2010 1:57 PM, Andy Pugh wrote: > On 23 March 2010 18:28, Stephen Wille Padnos<spad...@sover.net> wrote: > >> Roland Jollivet wrote: >> >> >>> I truly wish some company would bring out a 'real' CAD/CAM package at 1/5th >>> of the price and blow the others out the water. >>> >>> >> Well, someone actually did. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be going >> very well for them. >> >> I bought CadMax Solid Master<http://www.cadmax.com> about 5 years ago. >> It's a real parametric solid modeling package, with a dynamic feature >> tree (much like SolidWorks), import/export of several formats (though >> unfortunately IGES costs extra), and fully associative sketches and >> prints. >> > Alibre is cheaper still and supports IGES without extra expense. All > it seems to lack is the ability to change dimensions in a drawing and > have the model change to match (and I am not completely sure that the > facility is missing, it might be I have not found it). > > I used AutoDesk Inventor all day, every day for a couple of years and > I have to confess that there are not a great number of Inventor > features missing from Alibre that I notice the lack of. > > The $197 / £89 version has a Demo version of the MecSoft CAM package > available, and I believe that there is a way to unlock it into a very > limited version (Alibre CAM Xpress) but I can't figure out how. The > Demo version doesn't output G-Code. > > I would certainly say that it is worth trying the 30 Day free trial > version of Alibre Design, it runs under VMWare on a Mac and probably > also under Wine in Linux. > After 30 days it reverts to the "Express" Version, but even that seems > perfectly usable, the main limits being 5 parts per assembly and no > Inventor/ProE import/export. > > -- Kenneth Lerman 55 Main Street Newtown, CT 06470 203-426-3769 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
