Thread: Anybody know a good educational source for Esprit milling?

I will be joining a company shortly that uses the Esprit software. I only have experience with Mastercam. I did email Esprit about an educational copy, but its only been 48 hours and they havent gotten back to me yet. Wondering if anyone has a good source for learning.

Originally Posted by iloveTXBBQ

I will be joining a company shortly that uses the Esprit software. I only have experience with Mastercam. I did email Esprit about an educational copy, but its only been 48 hours and they havent gotten back to me yet. Wondering if anyone has a good source for learning.

Esprit is in the middle of a buyout by Hexagon, they may be changing how they support and what they'll give out for free.

I know Hexagon gives out student versions of surfcam ... but not sure about all the other software they have in their catalog.

Good luck getting anything 'educational' from Esprit. They might get you a 30 day demo but unlikely if you are not a business. I hope this changes with Hexagon at the Helm, it really is amazing software that more should know about.
Learning content, check out camwizard...its not cheap though.

There used to be a company called CIM Integrators that did training DVD's, but it looks like they are no more.

CAM wizard has some similar looking training DVD's. Don't have any direct experience though.

CAM Wizard is basically all there is for training material AFAIK.

I don't think they offer educational or trial seats to individuals, but it would be extremely difficult software to self teach anyways. It's great software, and once it makes sense, the workflow is great. However, Esprit is not intuitive at all.

Originally Posted by boosted

Esprit is not intuitive at all.

The only reason for this is that most are coming from some other CAM that is chained based. With Esprit being featured based it takes some time to think in a new way. If you learn Esprit from the get go, without having to un-learn chain based CAM, its as easy as any other system.

Originally Posted by goooose

The only reason for this is that most are coming from some other CAM that is chained based. With Esprit being featured based it takes some time to think in a new way. If you learn Esprit from the get go, without having to un-learn chain based CAM, its as easy as any other system.

I beg to differ. I never found the manufacturing workflow to be that difficult. In fact, I love the feature based machining, and it just made sense from the start. The unintuitive part is the terrible interface, abysmal geometry creation, buggy simulation, and weird tribal knowledge that goes into setting things up. And again I say this as a fan of the software. I've tried a lot of solutions, and so far nothing handles multi-channel turning with anywhere near the power and flexibility of Esprit.

Have you tried TNG yet? That's how modern software should behave. The workflow is very similar, but way easier to train people to use. I wish they would have structured things better so that they could remove the legacy product instead of struggling to support both. When we were implementing TNG on our 5 axis machines, it couldn't handle programming the MillTurns. Then they had issues with the source code in TNG and had to rebuild the whole damn thing. In hindsight, the issues with TNG might be part of why they sold.

Originally Posted by goooose

Good luck getting anything 'educational' from Esprit. They might get you a 30 day demo but unlikely if you are not a business. I hope this changes with Hexagon at the Helm, it really is amazing software that more should know about.
Learning content, check out camwizard...its not cheap though.

Hmmm thats unfortunate. Mastercam learned the hard way by making their software innaccesible. Now I believe they offer one year educational seats . I do have a business LLC for a shop I dissolved. Perhaps I'll just use that and act like an interested buyer.

Originally Posted by iloveTXBBQ

Hmmm thats unfortunate. Mastercam learned the hard way by making their software innaccesible. Now I believe they offer one year educational seats . I do have a business LLC for a shop I dissolved. Perhaps I'll just use that and act like an interested buyer.

They told me they don't do eval software and will only do a demo where you can watch them. I would have liked to have tried it but I was and am unwilling to drop 20K on software I can't play with first. Now that they were bought out I'm glad I went a different route.

The lack of a true trial period is why I ultimately went with Siemens NX instead of ESPRIT. Is NX the absolute best CAM package? Probably not, but better the devil you know than the devil you don't, and all that... I told the DP sales engineer as much in the end, that their lack of a trial very possibly lost them a sale. He seemed genuinely appreciative of the feedback and seemed to imply that some changes on that front may be coming in the near future.

Youtube has good videos

Originally Posted by Hardplates

They told me they don't do eval software and will only do a demo where you can watch them. I would have liked to have tried it but I was and am unwilling to drop 20K on software I can't play with first. Now that they were bought out I'm glad I went a different route.

I know this is an old post, but I think that depends on the salesman in your area. Ours was willing to give us a 90 day trial license.