Architecture, Solids Machining Improvements Found in New SmartCAM V14.5

Thursday, October 15, 2007 - Springfield, Oregon - SmartCAMcnc has announced the field test release of all SmartCAM V14.5 applications. The SmartCAM CAM software family consists of Production Milling, Advanced Milling, FreeForm Machining, Production Turning, Advanced Turning, Advanced Wire EDM, and Advanced Fabrication. The company plans to release the product to all maintenance and new customers in November of this year.

SmartCAM® V14.5 brings a significant modernization of SmartCAM's powerful macro language, and builds on and adds to the working with Solids, visualization and usability themes found in recent releases.

"SmartCAM has long been recognized for its extensive customization capabilities," said Doug Oliver, SmartCAMcnc's Senior Product Manager. "In order for us to extend this core strength we have replaced the old macro system runtime interpreter with a new two-pass compiler. This immediately provides several key benefits to our users including faster processing, uniform language syntax, and built in error checking and reporting."

The macro language has been enhanced with dynamic arrays, simpler string construction, additional branching capabilities, and new macro commands designed to solve specific programming needs, and it provides the opportunity for additional customization capabilities to be added in future releases.

Version 14.5 also demonstrates SmartCAMcnc's established commitment to solids machining: added to all SmartCAM applications is the ability to create a solid model by stitching together a set of surfaces. "Many users receive CAD data from a variety of sources, so being able to work with both open-surfaces, which are often provided from IGES data, and solid models is critical," Douglas went on to say. "By providing tools such as the new auto-stitch capability, users working from open-surface models can now take advantage of the higher-level SmartCAM capabilities that are only available for solid models."

Other Highlights

Continuing on the machining from solids improvements of v14, several new geometry modeling tools and selection techniques are provided:

• A new arc/line polyline fit function allows prismatic edge geometry to be extracted from an entire surface/solid model.
• New curve extraction tools allow 4th axis toolpaths to be created using the edge data of 3D wrapped features (advanced products only).
• Additional topological selection methods allow simple selection of an entire solid, and provide options to select all faces connected to the current selection set, or only those that are tangent.