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TAMBOY 3d CAM sfotware?


chipman
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15 hours ago, nickbe10 said:

It certainly doesn't look anything like an APT geometry file, with all the "NUL" characters removed it might be different, but it doesn't look like that would leave any "useful format", but then is a .GOE file a Geometry (.GEO) file? Another possibility would be a .CL (Cutter Location) file, but I would expect to see more Real Numbers.......more like an .NCI file.....

Well this has turned fascinating hasn't it........

Yes, It is all foreign to me. 

The latest is that sales dept is in contact with the customer, they are proposing a new and improved design?

That will make my life easier!

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20 minutes ago, chipman said:

Yes, It is all foreign to me. 

The latest is that sales dept is in contact with the customer, they are proposing a new and improved design?

That will make my life easier!

Fresh models done in a modern CAD system is the way to go... though I have to admit,

I find this thread very interesting

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57 minutes ago, gcode said:

Fresh models done in a modern CAD system is the way to go... though I have to admit,

I find this thread very interesting

That's kind of where I am at.  This is a perfect example of the age old discussion of what happens when your CAM software is no longer usable.

Same goes for old files such as V9 files, can we even open them with the latest release?  How far back can we go?

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21 hours ago, huskermcdoogle said:

Same goes for old files such as V9 files, can we even open them with the latest release?  How far back can we go?

Yes .. you can open V9 in MC2018 .. I don't think V8 will open though.

I have had trouble with V9 solids blowing up in modern releases

The solution is to open them on X5 or 6, save that , then open the X5 file in MC2018

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5 minutes ago, Newbeeee™ said:

So the conclusion is that it is ECONOMIC SUICUIDE for a business to go cloud based with their software.

Perpetual Licences are a MUST for any (sensible) business...

Not it you are the one that can hold all the people using your cloud based software hostage at some point in the future.

Offer it for free at 1st then offer it for $39 a year then offer it for $99 a year then $199 a year then $999 a year then $27,500 a year then who knows where it could end. Pay it or lose all your work and put your company out of business. That could never happen are you crazy or something? :D :whistle:

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1 hour ago, C^Millman said:

Not it you are the one that can hold all the people using your cloud based software hostage at some point in the future.

Offer it for free at 1st then offer it for $39 a year then offer it for $99 a year then $199 a year then $999 a year then $27,500 a year then who knows where it could end. Pay it or lose all your work and put your company out of business. That could never happen are you crazy or something? :D :whistle:

Nail on the head there Ron.

I'm seeing a bunch of fresh startup companies, lured by coffee slurping fixie hipsters (CNC Machining is cool! Boom! 5 Axis is easy!)  selling Cloud Based and Subscription only software (you can guess the company), notably with "strategic" Haas partnerships. Five or more years later, they'll be bent over paying ransoms to keep their software running.

As you say, :whistle:

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Just now, gcode said:

this looks like a business opportunity in the making...

in the near future there will be a ton of work for guys who can keep a Haas 5X running

Are you talking maintenance people who can repair broken Haas's because some hipster was told by his awesome "software distribution artisan" that the eyecandy simulation in his cloud based software did TCP fine? Then, yeah, I agree... :lol:

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2 hours ago, gcode said:

Yes .. you can open V9 in MC2018 .. I don't think V8 will open though.

I have had trouble with V9 solids blowing in in modern releases

The solution is to open them on X5 or 6, save that , then open the X5 file in MC2018

You're right that this is a fascinating thread.  

You wouldn't believe the amount of effort we put into ensuring your 5ish year old files still open safely in the current version.  Unfortunately, once you get past that, you start to run into all sorts of interesting conversion problems.  Although it's more effort, the way you describe above is absolutely the correct way to ensure data integrity.  I'd guess that you can skip 5 versions at a time, but I wouldn't risk more than that if you have solids or advanced surfaces.  All kinds of neat things happen under the hood when you open an old version.

As a practical example, with our daily builds of 2019 we still have X8 and X9 files being tested against them (for my team, specifically, I'm testing toolpath integrity).  I don't have any v8 or v9 files, though.  I wouldn't particularly care if they couldn't be directly opened, that's way off the side of the cost vs reward matrix.  Now, I WOULD expect that v8 file to be able to be updated to, say, X2 okay.  And I'd expect that X2 file to open successfully in X7 and on and on.   At each step, it will be validated with the lastest tech and making sure that the data is converted to modern structures, etc.

That's the trade-off to being one of the oldest CAM systems still in use, you guys have high expectations that there's a path forward for the work you did 10 years ago, and we want to ensure that you can do it.  That's also why we go through such effort to make sure your licensing works forever starting with the version you bought in at.

 

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Legacy files are not important to most, but at my company (OEM) with a deep history of over 50 years, it is.

We are always being called and asked to make replacement parts for customers from around the world.

We have had a few issues, but most of the time it is flawless. So it is good to hear that Mastercam takes this into consideration.

 

On a side note my old boss used to brag about program M-1, still in use to this day, gets pulled out maybe once  a year, created back in 06/06/1981.The setup sheet was written on some loose leaf paper, yeah it is a only a little bit of drilling, but it gets the job done and has run and been proven many times before.

Old school cool in my eyes and a hats off to those early pioneers of NC programming! 

setup.png

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18 hours ago, C^Millman said:

Offer it for free at 1st then offer it for $39 a year then offer it for $99 a year then $199 a year then $999 a year then $27,500 a year then who knows where it could end. Pay it or lose all your work and put your company out of business. That could never happen are you crazy or something? :D :whistle:

 

17 hours ago, Newbeeee™ said:

Am I surrounded by cynics?

Ron, I'm SHOCKED .....SHOCKED I say, that such a thought would cross your mind

And just the other day I thought I was getting cynical......then I stopped to think about it for a moment and realized I just wasn't keeping up..........

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2 hours ago, nickbe10 said:

 

Ron, I'm SHOCKED .....SHOCKED I say, that such a thought would cross your mind

And just the other day I thought I was getting cynical......then I stopped to think about it for a moment and realized I just wasn't keeping up..........

Not a thought a reality I have witnessed. Blew my mind someone would pay $27,500 a year in software to program their 5 Axis machines and this was for one seat not many seat just one seat.

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48 minutes ago, C^Millman said:

Not a thought a reality I have witnessed. Blew my mind someone would pay $27,500 a year in software to program their 5 Axis machines and this was for one seat not many seat just one seat.

I wish I could say that such things surprised me, but as my old mentor used to say "Just when I thought I'd seen it all......".

And the word I have (as yet unconfirmed independently) is that Boeing is about to bring the hammer down. Subscription based software violates the NDA agreement people have with Boeing because you are no longer 100% in control of your software/files......and with the NDA gone so goes your ITAR clearance.....I don't know how it affects Non-Tier Boeing  suppliers (sub-contractors who supply through companies on the Tier system) but for us it would be a big problem......we have one seat of Featurecam but it is still non-subscription do to being "grandfathered", but any serious upgrade or module addition might give them the excuse they are looking for.....

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4 hours ago, nickbe10 said:

And the word I have (as yet unconfirmed independently) is that Boeing is about to bring the hammer down. Subscription based software violates the NDA agreement people have with Boeing because you are no longer 100% in control of your software/files......and with the NDA gone so goes your ITAR clearance.....I don't know how it affects Non-Tier Boeing  suppliers (sub-contractors who supply through companies on the Tier system) but for us it would be a big problem......we have one seat of Featurecam but it is still non-subscription do to being "grandfathered", but any serious upgrade or module addition might give them the excuse they are looking for.....

The topic of subscription services and cloud based software or storage is a deep one and will forever be an evolving topic until regulations come into play with enough force to make something change.

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27 minutes ago, huskermcdoogle said:

The topic of subscription services and cloud based software or storage is a deep one and will forever be an evolving topic until regulations come into play with enough force to make something change.

Agreed, but Boeing swing a pretty big stick. If their compliance dept. says they will not accept it, no amount of regulation (either self regulation by the parties involved or by the government) is going to move them, again this would probably only apply to the Tiered suppliers, but this sort of thing has a tendency to get bigger as it roles down hill.

It used to be that Boeing would inspect incoming parts. Now that they don't machine the vast majority of the structural parts on commercial jets they got rid of the incoming inspection and passed the entire responsibility to the Tiered suppliers and, guess what, now we are doing the same to our suppliers........

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8 hours ago, gcode said:

did they get good results for their $27K

We quit talking at that point. It was mentioned it was a much faster going in that direction and was revolutionary software, but they would never say what it was. I suspect some lies were being floated, but then I heard it again about the company so time will tell if it really works out.

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  • 3 weeks later...

and when I say incremental, each and every tool needs to start at part zero and 1 inch above, as the early programmers here did not know that work offsets existed??

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear fellow machinist  there were times when  that was exactly so .
I used to run some very antic machine  it had no home and no offsets

Naturally it had no toolchange

system run powered by apple][

WE USED THE SAME PRINCIPLE LIKE  THIS :

ProgrAM always incremental first point of program and last one are the same one -program home and  z is 25 mm over the part -HA-ha !!!

I had some other machine it had offsets but no home .

One of the first LX  systems

 

HTH

 

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The first CNC machine I ran was a Burgmaster drilling machine

The table was controlled by a tape reader.

As Bear said, the program was incremental and it had to end where it began

If you had a .001 error in the tape, your tenth part would be .010 out of position

and your 100th part would be .100" out

We programmed this machine with PencilCam and it was a lot of work to build a tape

that drilled, and counter bored hundreds of holes.

The head was a 6 spindle Burgmaster drilling head controlled by mechanical dogs and

a huge cabinet full of electronic switches.

On hot days the electronic switches would malfunction and the drilling head would

rapid through the part or fail to retract between table motion.

Running it was quite an experience.

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Gcode , good old days!

Yeah!

No drill cycles too !

And  the machine was nc ,not cnc !

You can over-travel one axis(X for example) get the alarm and axis stop yet  second axis (suppose Y) will continue to move

Lots of backlash and lots of fun

And still we made good parts 

 


Machine - builder from city Kabul
Once had built an advanced machine - tool .
Now controller is wrecked ,
And the basement is cracked ,

And the spindle is powered by mule !

 

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5 hours ago, Teh Bear without Brains kinda idiot said:

Machine - builder from city Kabul
Once had built an advanced machine - tool .
Now controller is wrecked ,
And the basement is cracked ,

And the spindle is powered by mule !

 

:rofl:

You're killin' me, Alex. I love it! :thumbsup:

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