INQUIRY : Instructor has older version of Mastercam...

[seattlemanufacturing]

I am currently in my second year studying manufacturing tech. I have been playing around with CAD/Mastercam for quite  a long while, but am just now learning to actually use it as is expected in industry.

From my understanding, Mastercam is no longer going to be required... A little birdy told me something along the lines of the school not wanting to cover the licensing fees - so they're switching to Fusion

Anywho, my instructor is still offering extra credit if we want to do the Mastercam work anyways. However after turning in my first few assignments, he got back to me today saying that he can't open up the files because he has an older version of Mastercam?

From the little research I've done - it seems like this is one way they try to keep you purchasing updates...very Apple-ish of them....

I'm wondering if anybody has any idea of a workaround? For example, is there a way I save with backward compatibility? Or perhaps there's another filetype I can save as that would still keep my toolpaths/machine setups?

I can't be the first to run in to this problem...

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[JParis]

The simple answer is no....and it's not very Applie'ish....most software titles are not fully backwards compatible..

You of course can save the part geometry in a format that he can open but the tool path information does not go backwards...

 

[gcode]

5 hours ago, seattlemanufacturing said:

I'm wondering if anybody has any idea of a workaround? For example, is there a way I save with backward compatibility?

No

You could save the geometry as a step file and take that back but the toolpaths are not backwards compatible.

You best bet would be for both of you to download the Home Learning Edition from Mastercam.com

HLE Download

That way you'll both be on the same release and using the newest version.

 

[Jobnt]

7 hours ago, seattlemanufacturing said:

so they're switching to Fusion

     

Enjoy!!

 

But seriously, no way to save backwards.