CAM wizards

[roambotics_scott]

It's great to see CAM 360 finally make it to OS X.. but also a bit disheartening to see everything involved in actually using it.

I know that it's not quite something that can be reduced to a single «design toolpaths» button, but it'd be great to be able to download or set up a profile for the availiable tools and then have it use heuristics to come up with a «good enough» sequence of toolpaths (although the current approach is definitely nice for keeping machinests employed 🙂

[curtis.chan]

Hello Scott, Glad to hear you're using CAM for Fusion 360, and great thoughts on a heuristics approach. The Tool Library for CAM on a Mac is a preview of our new Library functionality, but still has a ways to go. You'll be able to pick a material and tool, then the feeds and speeds will automatically be adjusted based on the tool and material selected In due time). I'll talk with the development team about your comments, but you'll enjoy what the new Tool Library will evolve too. We're on a rigorous design schedule, so expect updates to CAM every 6 weeks, and please do let us know what you like or what needs more attention. Thanks!

[anthony.graves]

First, thanks for the great feedback. We are excited by the amount of users who are beginning to work with the CAM tools and I wanted to share some insight into how we one the Autodesk CAM Team approach toolpath creation/automation.

There have traditionally been two types of CAM solutions; Feature-based/Knowledge-based (FBM/KBM or "automatic") and manual.

Popular or well-known FBM/KBM type systems include, but are not limited to, Camworks (integrated), FeatureCAM (stand-alone, from Delcam, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Autodesk), and Edgecam (stand-alone, from Vero - an Autodesk Partner). This approach leverages the software's ability to identify features and then apply rules to automatically or very quickly generate CNC toolpaths. The strenth and weakness of these systems is their ability to identify machinable features and how intelligent the rules are. Often times users are required to create and edit these rules to get optimal results. This is great if you are an experienced machinist/CNC programmer - and have the time to spend defining the rules. Note: Most if not all of the FBM/KBM systems come with a set of pre-defined rules based on years of feedback from customers; but this is a starting point.

Popular or well-known manual type systems include, but are not limited to, GibbsCAM (an Autodesk Partner), Mastercam, Surfcam, and Esprit. These CAD/CAM solutions have the user create their machining operations, often providing the ability to set defaults to speed programming. These tools are regarded as more flexible because they give the user complete control over feature selection (entire features intelligently gleaned by the software, series of faces or edges, contours, etc.) and machining strategies. In my experience, seasoned programmers prefer having the control and, with regular use, can produce toolpaths and posted CNC programs very quickly.

The approach we take with our Autodesk CAM solutions (HSMWorks, Inventor HSM, and Fusion 360) is more towards the manual side - but hopefully smarter. We allow users to create templates. These templates allow users to capture tooling, geometry (HSMWorks at present, working hard to get this into Inventor HSM and Fusion 360), and strategy values/parameters so users can get the toolpaths exacly the way they want, regardless of the features, very quickly. The feedback we have received over the years (much of our team was part of HSMWorks and joined Autodesk as part of an acquistion back in Oct 2012) from users is that this is a great approach and really works well for the broadest range of machining scenarios for the types of machining we support.

Another thing. If you have used both the 2D strategies and 3D strategies found in Fusion you'll notice that the two work very differently. Our 2D strategies require that you select the features or areas you want to machine. Interestingly enough, we had to do this because most of the seasoned CNC programmers we met actually preferred this for machining 2D or prismatic parts over how we machine using our 3D strategies. When you use our 3D strategies you don't select what you want to machine, but what you DON'T want to machine. Our 3D strategies look at the part as simply what is left after you cut away or remove the stock material around it. Believe it or not, this is a great way to approach machining and allows us to leverage a lot of machining intelligence in our strategies to produce excellent results. We are actually doing a class on this at AU, if you are attending (Ref. PE7367 - Fusion 360: CAM for Intermediate and Advanced Users). Note: We are working on some great videos to show the differences between 2D and 3D machining and hope to have those done shortly after AU.

If you are interested we can set up a GoToMeeting or, if a bunch of people are interested we can set up a GoToWebinar, and show you sooner. Let me know and I'll set it up - anthony.graves@autodesk.com

Again, thanks for taking the time to post. We really appreciate all the feedback and suggestions. We want to make Fusion 360 the best tool possible and that can only happen with your help.

Anthony Graves

Product Manager, CAM

cam.autodesk.com

cam.autodesk.de

[flaviocolnago]

yes, something similar to the automatic feature recognition and machining strategy used in featurecam would be great