Newbie- Every CAD prog claims to be the world's biggest and best...

[adamshive]

I work for a worldwide manufacturing plant that builds capital equipment for international plants and companies. We serve the aerospace, medical and defense industries. Needless to say, we have some nice equipment and software though certainly not the best.

We use AutoCAD Professional 09. The mechanical engineering division uses Inventor. I use striker systems peripheral in acad 09 for programming and striker systems dnc. This is programming only for 2D sheet metal punching. They both claim to be the absolute best in the world.

Do autoCAD and striker systems lead the way in the cnc world?

I'll let you know my opinions later....

[DareBee]

Although CAD is ALMOST essential to the way CNC is programmed these days - it technically has nothing to do with CNC. CAD is for design. It is just circumstance that SOME things that are designed in CAD happen to be used in CAM for CNC machining.

Your statement should be in the CAD section NOT the CAM section as they are completely different things - even though most CNC op/programmers "think" they are joined at the hip - this is not the case.
95% of my CAD never sees CNC and I even have a machining division.

Anyway - enough of my Rant.
FWIW I have NEVER heard of Striker?
I dislike ACAD with a passion although I would concede to using Inventor but I use their competition.


PS Sorry - I may have been a touch out of line - upon re-reading your post it appears that Striker may be some sort of CAM?

[diycnc]

i like inventor, and solidworks. i don't much see the use for auto cad 2d in a manufacturing environment.

what makes striker better than some of the other punch press programing software?

i have used

ap100us
ap100global
amp1e
computes punch 5

all of them seem to be about the same. i did like ap100global the best thou. punch 5 is what the company i work for now has and its about the worst.. you can make it work but it sucks at picking the best tool, and it always puts tools in the wrong size holder even if the right one is available.

[tlharris]

With re: to the original question...

1) Ditto DareBee's comments on CAD vs. CAM vs CNC.

CNC can be programmed 'straight up' if you know what you're doing. Nobody in their right mind would do this in a production environment, because...

CAM packages make it so much easier. They provide lots of essentially 'wizard' type interfaces that generate the code instead of generating it all by hand. If you don't have the geometry modeled to begin with, then most of them have some CAD-type modeling functionality built in. But remember, their purpose is to generate and optimize tooling paths and operations.

CAD packages are used to design. In the old days, primarily 2D drawings. Now very sophisticated 3D models, able to be used for physical simulations, etc. The trick is translating these digital models into something that the CAM software can use to eventually translate into g-code that the CNC machine understands. The more accurate the translation, the more efficient life will be. For example, in a 3D CAD program, if you model a tapped hole, the intent is surely that the hole will be drilled (likely using a twist drill bit) and then followed by a tap to cut threads. If the model is output as a 'dumb' solid, then the CAM package could easily interpret it as threads that need to be machined by a milling bit. Extreme (and unlikely) example, but the point is that some design intent got lost in translation.

From a legacy point of view, the vast majority of 2D/2.5D work (routers, punches, plasma/laser/waterjet) can be (and is) communicated via flat DXF file format. This was developed by Autodesk years ago, and is the worldwide (as far as I know) de facto standard. And as much as AutoCAD is arguably on it's last legs as a product (given the huge move to 3D products in recent years) it has an undeniable presence in the world, and likely will have for some time yet. I would say that AutoCAD 'leads the way' by any stretch. In fact, I'd argue strongly against it. But until all the legacy equipment and suppliers out there disappear or upgrade to 'contemporary' products, it's out there.