At NASA, Langley, we used Pro-Engineering and Pro-Manufacturing for two years, 1994-1996. It was a rough two years. We griped constantly. We'd switched from ANVIL5000, which was better.
I retired and began working with FreeForm machining. Oh, joy! It was better than either. NASA, Langley switched to Unigraphics. The guys who still work there love it, because it's so much better and easier to use than Pro-E, Pro-M was. I programmed an awful lot of parts from 1967 to now, and used an awful lot of CAM systems. None was better than FreeForm. A few had some features that were really nice, and I wish I had them still. But, I wouldn't give up FreeForm's capabilities for all the previous systems put together. The only reason I would consider another system was if the design work was being done on a CAD system that caused me problems importing the files into FreeForm. If there was a CAM system that was friendly to the CAD system, maybe even used the CAD native files, and was capable of making decent cutter path, I would consider a change. I currently import files into FreeForm, CadKey99, AutoCAD14, AutoCAD2000, Automated Desktop, Rhino3D, and Solid Edge. All of these have problems importing files from other systems. Sometimes the same file that imports well into one won't import into another. These are some highly rated systems. If they can't import files from another system without problems, then I don't believe there are any perfect systems out there. FreeForm has no more problems importing than any of the others. Any new system would have to allow user-configured code generators. I've had to deal with later purchases of new equipment for which the CAM system providers couldn't or wouldn't provide code generators. Once, I paid $10,000.00 for a "universal code generator" that claimed to be able to accept output from a large number of systems and convert it to any machine's code. Hah! The company finally gave us our money back after failing to make a single code generator work. SmartCam's code generators are great. Gene Bowen ====================================================================== To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================
