CNC connected to a Mac ?

[Erik Brinkman]

I am building 3 factories ... one in Denver, on in Holland and one in Korea.
Our entire company is Mac only. We don't even hire Windows People.
I am needing Vertical Mills, Horizontal Mills, Lathes and Hemp Saws .... all CNC.

I need to know 2 things ....
1. Who makes the highest quality most accurate CNC machines ?
2. How do I hook them to a Mac only system ?

[ihavenofish]

Originally Posted by Erik Brinkman I am building 3 factories ... one in Denver, on in Holland and one in Korea. Our entire company is Mac only. We don't even hire Windows People. I am needing Vertical Mills, Horizontal Mills, Lathes and Hemp Saws .... all CNC. I need to know 2 things .... 1. Who makes the highest quality most accurate CNC machines ? 2. How do I hook them to a Mac only system ?

1: define accurate whats yore price range and envelope?
2: put an ad out for a windows expert. many new cnc mills run it on the control is and most cad/cam apps require is. the remaining will use some variety of linux, unix, ms-dos or a custom OS.

theres probably some obscure controls and software that might use mac, but its highly unlikely they will go hand in hand with "highest quality and most accurate".

[daedalus]

That is a rather silly policy to have considering the vast amount of software that isnt available for mac os. If you have some kind of windows phobia, there are options to drive the mills from linux using EMC, but you still need to run your cad and cam software, which is predominantly windows only.

Put simply the majority of CAD packages are not ported to macs because there is such a small market for them (the mac user base tending to be non-technical), and because if you can afford $8k a seat for the software, you can probably afford a pc workstation to go with it.

Its not possible to answer 1 unless you tell us about what parts you want to make, out of what materials, with what tolerances.

[Erik Brinkman]

Let me resolve the "finest quality" aspect of the question first,
then I will resolve the programming needed to update the software.

So ....
I am looking for the sexiest, highest quality, most precise machinery.
I am looking for both opinions and the reasoning leading to the conclusions.

[Erik Brinkman]

We re linked to IDS-Research. R&D can't afford freeze-ups and viruses and all the other primitive nasty Windows things. The Best CAD software for many years in a row is Maya, which is Mac. The best overall software like PhotoShop (all Adobe products) used to be Mac-only. There is a huge amount of extremely high quality software that is Mac. If we had to we could run Mac and Windows on the same screen at the same time and drag-n-drop between them since Mac will run any OS, but the Mac OS is much cleaner. (The kernel in Windows is corrupt, and Windows has hidden back doors which allows viruses to enter thru Word, Excel or PowerPoint and many other Software Applications). It is just too risky for us. In the 24 years we have used MAC in R&D, we have never had a freeze-up, virus, worm, trojan horse etc. Mac has never had a successful viral attack in spite of the rumors. Most of the laptops sold in the world are MAC. It is far more capable than you might suspect. It is certainly far safer and more stable.

We can update the old Windows crap to Mac, but it takes some reprogramming.

The most importnt thing is to use the finest machinery we can get.
That was a far more important part of the overall question.

[ihavenofish]

Originally Posted by Erik Brinkman Let me resolve the "finest quality" aspect of the question first, then I will resolve the programming needed to update the software. So .... I am looking for the sexiest, highest quality, most precise machinery. I am looking for both opinions and the reasoning leading to the conclusions.

wow, you are a mac person.

hmm, let me try to phrase this in steve jobs speak...

what the heck do you want the machine to do!? ok, that was me speak...

whats accurate? .001? .0001? sub micron? does it need repeatability or precision. what about temperature stability? what materials are you cutting? its this high speed operations or can it take all week for a part?

price... $1000, $100000, $1000000? how big does it need to be? 20x40? bigger? jewelry sized? how bout axis movement, 3, 4, 5? synchronous 4th and 5th?

THERES NO SUCH THING AS DPI ON THE WEB!!!!

err.. sorry, that last one is reflex.







or if you just want shiny, get a DMG DMU-40 with glass scales and laser tool setup.

http://dmgcanada.com/us,milling,dmu4...K?opendocument

actually, its a bad ass machine for aerospace, and is "relatively" cheap at under 300k cdn. but yes... it runs on windows.

[John Welden]

Unfortunately I don't think there are any Mac cam packages. Everyone is stuck using the far inferior Windoze.

[ihavenofish]

Originally Posted by Erik Brinkman We re linked to IDS-Research. R&D can't afford freeze-ups and viruses and all the other primitive nasty Windows things. The Best CAD software for many years in a row is Maya, which is Mac. The best overall software like PhotoShop (all Adobe products) used to be Mac-only. There is a huge amount of extremely high quality software that is Mac. If we had to we could run Mac and Windows on the same screen at the same time and drag-n-drop between them since Mac will run any OS, but the Mac OS is much cleaner. (The kernel in Windows is corrupt, and Windows has hidden back doors which allows viruses to enter thru Word, Excel or PowerPoint and many other Software Applications). It is just too risky for us. In the 24 years we have used MAC in R&D, we have never had a freeze-up, virus, worm, trojan horse etc. Mac has never had a successful viral attack in spite of the rumors. Most of the laptops sold in the world are MAC. It is far more capable than you might suspect. It is certainly far safer and more stable. We can update the old Windows crap to Mac, but it takes some reprogramming. The most importnt thing is to use the finest machinery we can get. That was a far more important part of the overall question.

um, maya isnt CAD, its animation software. and it runs like complete crap on the mac. in fact, its so bad that Pixar.. owned by steve jobs does NOT use mac for animation. mac has largely been shunned by the cg industry simply because nothing runs on it.

alias studio tools is their design software, and while powerful, under their new autodesk ownership will be phased out for all platforms but windows in the near future.

the "best" cad package is usually considered catia, thought the 20k+ entry price is a bit much for most shops. solidworks is its little brother and i think is said to have the most seats worldwide. both apps are windows based. catia does/did have a unix version but it was phased out.

and photoshop... is anything but the best for image editing and every release it gets worse. sadly its a so called standard so we get forced to use it. and yes, it runs faster on windows, sorry.

i have 12 mac pros in my studio, they all run windows. we only got them cause they were cheap. and just to note: never get viruses on my pc.. and the macs in osx mode crash and freeze 10 times as often as the pc.. which is sad cause they dont even run anything!

as for rewiting software for mac... good luck with that.
not to be mean, but i hope youre not in charge of actually buying production machinery for your company. if you are, you need to learn a lot about machining in general before even getting to the questions you are trying to ask.

[John Welden]

Originally Posted by ihavenofish and photoshop... is anything but the best for image editing and every release it gets worse. sadly its a so called standard so we get forced to use it.

Too bad windoze is the standard we all get forced to use. Same goes for Fanuc. Complete crap that became industry standard. Makes me sick that a big part of my life is spent using these terrible products. Ignorant fools think these tools must be the best since everyone uses them.

[stevespo]

Erik, I'm actually a big Mac fan, but you've really got to get your facts straight. According to Ars Technica, Apple notebook sales in 2008 gave them a 4.6% market share. Hardly "most of the laptops in the world".

My friends in IT say that potentially XP/Vista are the most secure desktop platform going. The reason there are viruses is the 90% market share. Nobody cares about the Mac or Linux, but they also have abundant security holes.

As far as stable goes. I run Ubuntu/XP on a dual boot Dell laptop, and I'm surrounded by other engineers and MacOS X. They are crashing on a regular (sometimes daily) basis, while I go months without needing a reboot. I don't mean application crash, I mean system crash. I keep sessions going forever and hibernate/resume between them.

You obviously have reasons for your technical needs, but they're a bit removed from reality. You want the "sexiest" CNC machine? How about the Heidi Klum 2009 from Victoria's CNC Secrets? That was a weak joke - sorry.

Are you trolling? Are you seriously looking for help and advice? The people here are very willing to give it. Just provide more information and we'll do our best.

Steve

[ihavenofish]

Originally Posted by John Welden Too bad windoze is the standard we all get forced to use. Same goes for Fanuc. Complete crap that became industry standard. Makes me sick that a big part of my life is spent using these terrible products. Ignorant fools think these tools must be the best since everyone uses them.

in my experience, and i have a fair bit, windows IS superior to osx for the type of work i do. osx in fact is borderline unusable with 3d software.

for the email and web surfing masses, windows is also perfectly fine.. and so is mac.

the ignorant fools i find are the ones who hold a bias for one platform or another that has no basis in reality. use what works. period. for CNC, thats largely been windows in the last decade from the low end with mach, to the high end fanuc, heidenhain, and siemens controls on multi million dollar machines and nearly every cad and cam system available.

[daedalus]

Maya really isnt an engineering tool, its a modelling package for artists. If you go try solidworks you will start to see the big differences in feature set. Are you just looking for an easy approach to getting physical models of your parts, rather then mass production?

Dont take this the wrong way, but it doesnt sound like you have much experience with cnc, and you might be better off getting a rapid protoyping machine for your r&d, then outsourcing production. RP machines are pretty much plug and play, and you would be up and running in a few days.