[hanermo]

Endless issues ..
all the good big stuff like siemens nx, or dassault catia, or sw, is in the 30k+ range.

You can get good functional stuff like ad inventor cad for about 600 € if you lie or get a student edition by enrolling in something, anything.
Not sure if the cam is included - and you wont be able to migrate your stuff to commercial versions.

Madcam and fusion are probably the most mature reasonably priced no-cloud options.

The low cost - no cost options in linux are still pretty immature.
At some point, reasonable cad and reasonable cam is likely to appear .. years down the line.

cad, cam, are not so much difficult but endlessly complex with issues.
So they need endless deciding and coding on complex critical path corner issues in what-how situations with 5 dimensions, preferring speed, longevity, accuracy, tool life, machine wear.

And for commercial users, efficiency of cam paths may be very important.
So trochoidal machining, vs plain milling etc.


Good cad is very involved and much more complex than it seems.
And most-all 3d sw does not deal well at all with complex surfaces and binary ops.

Making a pair of dice is an example.
Should be easy, but it´s not.
And how accurate is the model ? How do you increase or define the accuracy ?

And the resulting models may be hard or impossible to use in cam sw.
Whats the radii on the dimples in the numbers ?

[joeavaerage]

Hi hanermo,
so how about some recommendations for continuous four and five axis CAM. This thread is less concerned about CAD and more about CAM.

The only cheap solutions I found so far are 3+2, so indexing four and five, which is a step in the right direction. The cheapest continouus five axis is Fusion +Machining Extensions,
do you have an alternative?

Craig