Cam a long way

There have also been changes in technology: solidsand feature-based machining systems and tools such as verifiers and simulators have caught on with a vengeance. Generally, buying decisions are more clear-cut than in the CAD market and are not adversely affected by trendy new companies entering the market and offering a new brand of snake oil to change the way everyone does business.

The ’CAM agnostic’ approach of recent years requires independent simulation and verification of the CAM output. Simulation is now part of every CAM system, but the trend is towards CAM systems with interfaces to CGTech’s VERICUT. Many CAM vendors have their own verification capability, but the industry was sceptical and resisted toolpath verifiers that came from the same software suite that generated the toolpath. In addition to the established interfaces (to CATIA V4 and V5, Siemens PLM, PTC, EdgeCAM and MasterCAM) over the past couple of years CGTech has added interfaces to GibbsCAM and Missler TopSolid CAM. Delcam has written an interface for PowerMill while Open Mind wrote one for hyperMILL.