SmartCAM V15.5 Released

Provides Nesting for Milling, Verification Control, Turn Roughing Enhancements

Improved Lead In/Out Functionality, Customer Requested Improvements Also Added

Friday, November 10, 2008 - Springfield, Oregon - SmartCAMcnc has announced the release of SmartCAM® V15.5 applications. Version 15.5 delivers a variety of new enhancements and capabilities to the SmartCAM suite of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) system software, from usability improvements such as verification control to new nesting options, and adds to the visualization and usability themes found in recent releases.

Email notifications have been sent to all SmartCAM software maintenance customers.

The SmartCAM CAM software family consists of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software applications for milling, turning, fabrication and wire EDM.

"Many of the improvements to Version 15.5 were made directly due to customer enhancement requests," said Doug Oliver, SmartCAMcnc's Senior Product Manager. "Additional toolpath verification control, stronger nesting options in our milling applications and bi-directional turn profiling for groove finishing are three such examples where customers helped us identify important areas on which we concentrated.

"Version 15.5 clearly demonstrates that customer-directed input is taken very seriously by SmartCAMcnc. The combination of versions 15.0 and 15.5 provide a marked improvement to the SmartCAM product line, and our customers will be more productive using SmartCAM than ever before."

New Showpath™, ShowCut™, and Code options allow the visual verification and coding to be restricted to the active step or group. This feature is extremely useful when you are developing tool path for a specific operation and wish to verify only that portion.

New nesting capabilities have been introduced into the SmartCAM V15.5 milling applications that when combined with existing nesting features provide milling users the ability to quickly and easily create sheet layouts for applications using equipment such as routers, lasers, burners, and water jets.

The new Lead In/Out functionality introduced with SmartCAM v15.0 is now available for bidirectional profile processing, typically used for groove finishing and undercut features that require bidirectional motion.

Version 15.5 also builds on V15.0's significant improvement to toolpath lead-in/lead-out creation and control by adding options for creating lead-in/lead-outs using an absolute angle. Absolute angles make it easy to enter or retract along a particular axis, regardless of the profile start and end orientation. In the case of turning, absolute angles can be used to ensure the tool enters and retracts along the tool bisector angle.

Additional enhancements to SmartCAM V15.5 include surface machining functionality that has been improved to provide greater control when using surface avoidance; and for SmartCAM turning applications, roughing improvements to material boundary definitions and material removal.