What does your team use as your CAM Software, and how well do you feel it integrates into your CAD workflow? For those of you who do not know, CAM is Computer Aided Machining, it is a software that you use to program tool paths for your CNC Machine.
MasterCAM for Solidworks, thanks to the new sponsorship this year. It’s pretty great if you come from a background in standalone MasterCAM as you now get parametric functionality on your tool paths.
Not quite as easy to use as HSMWorks, but it is more powerful.
We have Siemens as a sponsor, so we use the latest version of NX (currently 11, 11.5 should be here soon). NX has CAM tools built in in addition to its CAD tools. It’s a truly amazing, professional grade program, and many of our alumni have gone on to use it throughout college and eventually the workforce.
We’re using Inventor HSM Ultimate, and it’s pretty phenomenal. Integration into both Fusion 360 and Inventor, and it’s free for educational use. It’s really made running our machine a lot faster.
Inventor HSM Ultimate (for Inventor) and HSMWorks Ultimate (for Solidworks) are both free in the Autodesk Education Community. If for some reason you don’t have access to the Education (if you’re an FRC team with students, you should), the free versions of HSM for Inventor and HSM for Solidworks are available, but only support 2.5D milling, but that should be more than adequate for what most FRC teams need.
Inventor HSM ultimate, and very happy with it.
do you mix it with Teamcenter for workflow?