What is your OS -- windows, mac, linux?

[BillyDoc]

Hi Matt,

Did you ever find a work-around?

BillyDoc

[marshmat]

No... we gave up and put Vista back on the poor little thing after the better part of a day. If I were a pro IT guy, that would have been $350 in billing time to get a $700 computer back to the state it was in when I first touched it

[wet feet]

Originally Posted by BillyDoc

I still think there is an opportunity for some hot programmer there, just couple a tool-path program to some established program like Rhino, or start from scratch. I have seen some feeble attempts at this, but nothing usable for real-world complex projects. I would think that the milling machine manufacturers would love to get the software costs down and would pay someone handsomely to do it. It makes their products much easier to buy, after all. In my case it made the difference between a sale and no sale. Go price a 5 axis CNC machine sometime and you'll see the scale I'm talking about.

Have you taken a look at RhinoCAM?You could have bought Rhino plus the CAM extension several times for your original outlay.Not sure if it would work under WINE or similar.

[BillyDoc]

Hi wet feet,

I haven't looked at that market for about ten years now because I'm plugging along with the software I already own and know how to use. But when I bought Hypermill I don't think Rhino existed, or if it did I didn't know about it. I had to buy Mechanical Desktop to be able to do the job I had at that time, plus Hypermill. At least I made a profit overall . . . and I'm hoping to retire in a few months now, so new software is not going to happen in that area.

Now I use Rhino for all sorts of things, and love it. I think it's quite unusual for this sort of software, it almost always works. Out of curiosity, though, have you tried RhinoCAM? What kind of luck did you have with it?

BillyDoc

[BillyDoc]

Hi Matt,

I feel your pain! It was more than the better part of a day for me to end up in exactly the same place as you.

In the process of doing all this, though, I did seem to write to the disk with various linux bootable cds (Knoppix, Gpartid, DBAN) . . . which makes me think that I could probably load Linux successfully, if I could find all the necessary drivers. Also, the linux CoreBoot program seems to be coming along and we may be able to flash the BIOS with a real system before too long. My wife will retire in about 18 months now (it was going to be last week, but she had a change of plans) and then she won't need windows at all.

I would bet a bunch that Micro$haft paid HP and Toshiba to make their BIOS "Vista friendly" exclusively. Maybe we should file a complaint with the European commission that is looking into their monopoly practices.

BillyDoc

[marshmat]

I'm curious to hear about RhinoCAM too.
Rhino under WINE is a royal pain in the neck, though. Tweak it, tweak it more, it just won't run.
For small parts at the old solar car shop, we used to use MasterCAM, which was generally pretty good (except on the rare occasion when someone would have it lift the tool out of the work and move at high speed to another area... neglecting to think about the hardened steel clamp that would be holding the piece down somewhere between those points...).

Microsoft knows better than to pay OEMs to make their hardware OS-specific. Of course, a very good per-copy price for OEM volume licensing can certainly be negotiated if you're a large OEM, with certain terms to protect such a contract from being undercut by competitors.... and Microsoft certainly doesn't feel obligated to come up with new drivers to make XP compatible with new hardware....

[BillyDoc]

Hi Matt,

I've heard good things about MasterCAM as well. But when I was shopping for a program to generate tool paths I already had Mechanical Desktop so wanted something compatible with that (which MasterCAM is).

I went ahead and designed the part I wanted to make (a very complex injection molding mold with oddly curved surfaces) and took the MD file to a trade show in Chicago on a disk. I then went to the various vendors selling these tool path programs and asked them to generate a tool path for the part to demo their programs. Every one of them failed, except for Hypermill. So, that's what I bought.

Then I found all the bugs. And of course they wouldn't fix them, I had to "upgrade," or pay "maintenance fees." You know the rest.

Ah, but I know the answer to the tool clamp problem. I've discovered it many times, actually. Just use carbide cutting tools! The clamps snap them right off when they hit. It's like having really expensive fuses.

BillyDoc

[wet feet]

My experience with RhinoCAM only goes as far as downloading the evaluation version last autumn and trying to generate toolpaths.It seemed good and had the project for which it was intended not been put on ice due to the economic downturn,it would probably have been in use by now.
I'm a bit out of touch with MasterCAM,but if you worked through their tutorials there was an exercise to teach the process for avoiding clamps.The previous remarks about maintenance apply to their way of doing business and if you had a specific additional module,it might not work after an upgrade of the core package.Of course you can buy a fix.

[Sheepy]

Mepis! It just works.

[Jenny Giles]

XP is stable and that is a big plus for me. I still use Excel 97 because I don't need anything fancier for spreadsheet work.