One CNC XR Mill Expert comments

[Matt Berube]

Hi All,

We currently use Mastercam and have noticed OneCNC because of attractive pricing. It seems that for about the same money we were going to spend upgrading a seat of Mastercam, we could buy a complete seat of One CNC XR Mill Expert. Interesting...

I have a few questions, though...

Does OneCNC support parasolid (.xt) format ?

How are their posts ? No problems ? How much can the end user customize them "interactive"(ly) ?

I have heard there are no maintenance charges but what about upgrading ? If I had XP software and wanted to buy XR, how much would I pay ?

Does the rest robot work as awesome as it looks on the website ?

What is the licensing agreement like ? Can I install it on multiple PC's ? (home/work, for example)

How does the cavity/core separation work ? Does it create parting line geometry automatically ? Does the cavity/core separation work on solids ? Or only surfaces ?

I have heard that some CAM packages lay a "mesh" over the geometry and create toolpaths from that mesh and that it's not as accurate as other systems. Does OneCNC work that way ?

Come on Guys / Girls, Do your worst... I want to hear all of the dirt before I spend much time evaluating this stuff. I am coming from Mastercam w/Moldplus and would like to know if there will be any disappointments or missing features.

[HuFlungDung]

Hi Matt,

I'll answer what I can.

AFAIK, OneCNC does not handle the *.xt file format directly. It will import igs, 3dm,dxf, vda, step, sat, stl and perform nc backplots.

The posts are highly configurable, but not in the sense of vb scripting, which you might be used to. I feel that most users achieve the desired output. Even running an old Bandit cnc, I managed to get edit free code to post Now with running a Haas, no problems there either.

No maintenance, that is correct. There is usually a pre-release period when people buy the new version, but may run with an older version until release takes place. They don't have to pay extra, but existing users do pay something to upgrade to a new series. Interim releases for minor bug fixes, and sometimes new features, are free to users of that series product.

The Rest Robot is awesome. It will detect areas that need further machining. That is not to mislead you, those areas are not machined automatically (yet). However, single surface machining, or custom boundary machining can be used to recut those areas.

You can install the software wherever you plug your hardware key into. The hardware key must be present at all times. Network dongles are available, too.

OneCNC is totally NURBS. Meshes are never used. OneCNC is very proud of that

Mold splitting: well, the function is in there, not that I've used it a lot, but the primary objective of the software development was for mold makers, so I'm sure I would have heard some squawking by now. I could be mistaken, but I believe that models should be solids prior to performing any kind of split.

You've heard of doing an online demo, have you? You can talk to Michael Reyes at OneCNC in Florida, and he can show you online, using your model, as to how it works.

[Matt Berube]

Thank You kindly for your input !

[nervis1]

There is currently no parasolid translator.


I use XR expert with solidworks and export as a STEP14 file into Onecnc. I have not had any problems.

[Matt Berube]

Well,

We had an online demo today. Very interesting software. Nice people, too! I am not sure if we are going to get it or not as we use some extremely advanced features of Mastercam including the Moldplus add-on and OneCNC has a few important things missing. I can say that there is a TON of stuff I love about it, though. Specifically, Rest Robot is brilliant, the entire verification feature (including section views) is brilliant(especially compared to the worthless Mastercam verify), the concept that if you pay for 2 seats they give you a network license for 10 seats is awesome (I won't be holding my breath waiting for Mastercam to give us that one) and the price is a fraction of everything else that's available... I would heartily recommend this software to most any normal user. I'm just not sure if it would be worthwhile for us to use this and Mastercam to make up for the missing special features we need.