New Cam Software NX or Esprit

[cameraman]

There’s a conversation in the Featurecam forum on the AD website where a discussion between myself and the managing director of manufacturing software Al Whatmough about the development of 360 and its integration with FC and Partmaker. From the gist of the conversation it seems that any new development is done inhouse at AD. It's starting to be a long discussion since it's a Featurecam forum and some prick from AD had to jump in trying to push Fusion within the first five post.

If one reads through the whole thread this guy Al inadvertently gives out some interesting info on the future of AD, Fusion, and FC. They have all but killed off FC in lieu of Fusion but just wont directly admit it. He even went so far as to say in five years Fusion will will be on the same level as NX! He was quite proud of that until I reminded him that NX is constantly advancing advancing also.
FeatureCAM 2021 - Autodesk Community

Thanks for linking that.

I think Al was making the case [will probably use that thread] to his bosses / board that all of the manifest itty bitty complexities of all these different products is too much to handle development wise. Basically unmanageable or intractable. He's also implying that people don't know what they want, so how will they (AD) be able to serve properly these newly acquired user bases with NEW features. He also was trying to make the case that most users only use 20% of their software's capability and don't even know what their own respective softwares are capable of. But AL claims he has been supporting FC for 17 years ?

People "think" in broad strokes that you can just "Plug" in the different distinct and separate functionalities from different products that AD bought. But it's not so easy to do that and frankly every CAD and CAM and integrated CAD/CAM solution has their own architecture(s) to a large extent and is not directly "Modular" in a way you can just jam random "Parts" together ("wire them up") expecting it to work well in a completely different context. [That video explanation he linked to why design and manufacturing documents should be kept separate too was super patronizing and pedantic to the point of being almost completely banal ~ Again proving out his latent "thesis" that people are too stupid to know what they want. ~ Soooo how can they support that

when clearly (cough cough) Fusion 360 is the straight ahead forward looking solution of the FUTURE . ].

<Al W - excerpt from cited / linked thread post# 20 > As you all know, we have no shortage of CAM products at Autodesk. FeatureCAM, PowerMill, PartMaker, HSMWork, Inventor CAM, TRUX and Fusion 360. Each of these tools have become powerful solutions in their own right. At the same time, as we look at the request for each of the products, without knowing it, customers are asking for convergence. FeatureCAM customers want better 5X from Powermill, Powermill customers want to turning From Partmaker, HSMWorks customer want nesting from TRUNest, Introduction of additive, robotic and Fabrication technologies introduces a whole new set of capabilities. You get the point.

So the developers and actual front line "coders" will be isolating various aspects and separate components from these different original product's respective code bases (perhaps) - but most likely will be rebuilding modules from scratch that 'Jive" better with Fusion 360's core architecture. ~ Especially given the subscription model / associated appropriate architecture for that. Although in some cases those re-engineered modules may be "pale" imitations of the originals or in other cases be re-authored from scratch with better functionality, or just made "Fusion 360 flavored". Hence the "Better get used to Fusion 360 " (hint) -"Here have a free random license of 360 even if you think you don't need it now... ".

Also from that cited thread sounds like AD doesn't actually know what to do with FC ?

I didn't know Pro-E was still in existence and still strutting it's funky stuff

@g-coder_05 thanks for linking to that discussion + your analysis / viewpoint.

Bear in mind AD wants to keep the appearance of being a "Not-monopoly". ~ That's a hard act to perform if you actually DO buy everyone else out lol . Then you don't need to judiciously add/ build all this functionality to fusion 360 in a conscientious way when you have a massive captive market.

It's a business / capitalist "thing" hard to get around that.

@gcoder_05 cool that you are going for 30+ seats of ESPRIT ? (maybe) + various of Pro-E

 

[g-coder05]

@gcoder_05 cool that you are going for 30+ seats of ESPRIT ? (maybe) + various of Pro-E

It's kind of complicated but yes, 30 seats is what we are going with. My personal shop is in Foshan China while the sister shop is in Zhongshan. I teamed up with shops in Phnom Penh Cambodia, Vientiane Laos, HCMC Vietnam, Wugu Taipei Taiwan and the Office here in the Philippines. I just registered my company name and use their location and in turn they get the advantage of claiming western ownership or management and I just have to chit chat with their customers on occasion.

All the shops communicate and share programs and drawings so we decided that we would all stick with the same software. Now, NX is the dominant software in Asia hands down. It's a matter of a phone call to any school and they can send a programmer right over who knows NX inside and out. The issue I raised is I have read many places that Siemens has embedded code that tracks unlicensed copies and they can pounce anytime they want. The last thing I want is some kid that has a cracked version on his laptop getting his programs mixed in with legitimate files and have to take on Siemens.

We all agreed that since AD was not even an option anymore due to their ransomware tactics and no upgrades, only bug fixes. (Like one of that last post in that thread where the guy said 2020.3 had a bug fix for an issue he created a ticket for five years ago only to be told nobody else had that problem). Aside from Featurecam, Esprit is hands down the best with Feature Based Machining and when 87% of our work is rapid prototyping we need to jam out code fast. I'm not looking to spend a few extra hours on the CAM to save 5 or 10 seconds on 1000 parts, rather save 3 hours programming and ad 10 minutes to one part.

30 something seats of Esprit sounds like a lot but spread that out over seven locations it doesn't quite seem as much.

As far as the Creo? That's my new favorite, even though I'm still just scratching the surface. The modeling is fluid, Assemblies just seem to work flawlessly, Probing I would say is a selling point on its own. Post building is almost as good as XBuild, it even has a promoted tutorial that works with you to build from scratch.

 

[jeffj]

The issue I raised is I have read many places that Siemens has embedded code that tracks unlicensed copies and they can pounce anytime they want.

You don't think all the CAM companies already have or are considering this?

 

[g-coder05]

You don't think all the CAM companies already have or are considering this?

Oh, I'm sure they do. The point I'm trying to make is that over here NX is king. By going with Esprit we have a better chance of catching someone using a cracked copy.

 

[Plane Parts]

Use what you can hire or what the local college uses.
VARs are useless in my book and should not be considered "support". I've NEVER had one figure out a problem. Not once.