Our team recently acquired an Axiom PRO CNC. The students are in love with Onshape. Looking for suggestions on how teams are moving from Onshape to finished product. VisualCAMc looks awesome but $99/mo… anybody know if they do educational discounts or freeware? FreeMill?
I know a lot of teams like to use Fusion 360.
It’s free, can do CAM and if a slight tweak needs to happen to the model they have the tools right there.
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We use Fusion 360. We export the STEP file from Onshape and load it into Fusion 360 to do the cam. It’s free for educational purposes.
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Fusion 360 is good. Especially when you start making templates for cuts. Then it’s easy to import a model and start cutting quickly.
I believe every team also gets a copy of MasterCAM. That’s an excellent program, but it has a bit of a learning curve. I have only used it like once or twice before switching
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We’re using Fusion 360 as well. Like @Underdog_19 we export STEP for flat parts; for sheet metal parts we export DXF. There are a number of recent posts with some good info, e.g. here and here. Lots of online help for Fusion as well – the NYC CNC Youtube channel is a good one, and there are others.
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As part of the Virtual KoP for the past few years, teams have had free access to Mastercam which is arguably the best CAM platform out there.
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+1 to everyone else saying Fusion 360. It is really simple to use, and has really good capabilities. Just download the .step file from OnShape and import it.
MasterCAM is also an option (it has come in KOP for the last few years), but it has a much steeper learning curve than fusion 360 does.
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Team 4414 used Fusion 360 and Onshape all of last year and will 100% continue to use in the future. Great Products.
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I was at the Onshape users group in Boston earlier this month and was told I should look into VisualCAM.
I haven’t had a chance, yet, but it looks like it integrates directly with Onshape.
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103 has been using Onshape for modeling and Fusion 360 for CAM as well. It is a few steps to export from Onshape and then import into Fusion, but it works well and both are free for teams/educational use
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I explored VisualCAM a little bit when it was a free beta. I didn’t get too far because I didn’t have a pressing need but it looked very similar to Fusion 360 in operation. VisualCAM costing money vs free Fusion was the deciding factor in sticking with Fusion (for now). That being said, I would love an affordable integration with Onshape to remove another link in the chain.
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Firestorm Robotics 6341, has changed to Onshape this year, because better accessibility than Solidworks. But we may still use our dedicated CAD machines that have Solidworks to do our CNC machining for 2 reasons:
- I have used SolidworksCAM and I figured out how to translate to our current CNC mill.
- The fonts in Onshape are limited, and our team font cannot be created easily without going through another program anyways.
We are also in the OnShape -> Fusion 360 camp.
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