On 23 March 2010 18:28, Stephen Wille Padnos <spad...@sover.net> wrote: > > Roland Jollivet wrote: > >> I truly wish some company would bring out a 'real' CAD/CAM package at 1/5th >> of the price and blow the others out the water. >> > Well, someone actually did. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be going > very well for them. > > I bought CadMax Solid Master <http://www.cadmax.com> about 5 years ago. > It's a real parametric solid modeling package, with a dynamic feature > tree (much like SolidWorks), import/export of several formats (though > unfortunately IGES costs extra), and fully associative sketches and > prints.
Alibre is cheaper still and supports IGES without extra expense. All it seems to lack is the ability to change dimensions in a drawing and have the model change to match (and I am not completely sure that the facility is missing, it might be I have not found it). I used AutoDesk Inventor all day, every day for a couple of years and I have to confess that there are not a great number of Inventor features missing from Alibre that I notice the lack of. The $197 / £89 version has a Demo version of the MecSoft CAM package available, and I believe that there is a way to unlock it into a very limited version (Alibre CAM Xpress) but I can't figure out how. The Demo version doesn't output G-Code. I would certainly say that it is worth trying the 30 Day free trial version of Alibre Design, it runs under VMWare on a Mac and probably also under Wine in Linux. After 30 days it reverts to the "Express" Version, but even that seems perfectly usable, the main limits being 5 parts per assembly and no Inventor/ProE import/export. -- atp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
