we have a new swiss style screw machine and it's harder to program than our Citizens so we are looking at CAM to help us out. We are doing fairly complicated machining and with live tooling thrown in.
Anyone had both or have any good reasons to go one way or the other?
after being on and off esprit, (dos, windows and nix) since version 1, I'd suggest something else. It just seems more complicated than it should be.
Its definitely capable of doing anything, it just seems harder than the rest.
Mold shop rule #1: If its hard...your doing it wrong.
I'd suggest looking at systems where you can act on geometry and features directly. If you have to convert an edge to a line to measure it? naaaa. The other thing is learning. The best cam system hidden in a box is useless. Make sure the software has a lot of users in the real world, see if you can find data and training on it outside the cam systems realm. Cimatron is a great system, but it's too hard to find learning material and other users. Esprit is the same, hard to find forums and groups of users out there. My guess is finding people to run this stuff would be directly proportionate to the amount of users on the net you can find.
Important: MAKE SURE YOU CAN EDIT THE POST PROCESSOR! Especially if your moving into equipment with new capabilities.
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