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n'thing the "Solidworks is actually stable and good" sentiment. It definitely thinks in a different way than Fusion, though, so there's a learning curve. Ultimately I think it comes down to what you learn first: I started on Solidworks and Fusion frustrates the living hell out of me.
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Sep 22, 2020 03:41
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sharkytm posted:I ran SolidWorks 2015 and now 2020. I think I've had 5 crashes that weren't my fault like opening a bad document or using a buggy plugin (Xometry, I'm looking at you). Thousands of hours of time in design, lots of revisions, and lots of broken parts from suppliers or STEP imports. I dunno, it's loving solid for me. I do run a Quadro card. I personally have had problems with Fusion 360 the last months, my cloud stored drawings where corrupted and broke the program on multiple occassions and multiple projects. It's been crashing more with time, used to be quite stable but has gotten worse. So to me it's not like F360 is that good anyway. I installed Solidworks on sunday but I haven't yet done anything with it, kinda busy with other stuff. Will be interesting to see how it works and behaves, I started out with Sketchup myself, then F360, then a little Solid Edge. With regards to SE I find the interface a bit frustrating, mainly how I move and rotate the view and I am not allowed to customize it. And often tutorials I follow don't work at all. This drat synchronous mode makes the program behave so differently and some functions won't work in synchroous mode, or vice versa. So if I want to use the conventional mode X feature doesn't work like the tutorial says and I don't see an alternative.
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Sep 22, 2020 06:39
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Solidworks is the worst 3D modeling program there is, except for all the others*. It's actually just fine once you get used to how it works, but it has a ton of random little undocumented bugs/"quirks" that are absolutely infuriating until you find out what's going on. For instance, one of my favorites is that the equation editor won't accept a user-defined global variable called "thickness." If you try it, it will accept the name just fine, but when you try to assign a value it says "the equation is invalid." So you spend forever trying to figure out why the hell the equation is invalid when it's something as simple as "thickness" = 12mm, but the syntax is actually perfectly fine and the solution was simply to call it "dim1" or "depth" or "t" instead. There is no documentation of this, or indeed that there are reserved variable names at all, anywhere. Because who the hell would have a part with some dimension named thickness, anyway? Inconceivable! On the other hand, SolidWorks has the best mechanical parametric modeling setup of any CAD system I've used. With proper use of relations, equations, mates and assemblies you can build some incredible associative models that update themselves to reflect design changes in seconds. I always go to SolidWorks first for anything mechanical and it's actually almost (almost) a joy to use when you get everything really buttoned down. On the other other hand, there are still many things you cannot do with SolidWorks, or which it does very poorly, so it is not suited to everyone's particular job. It can't do any organic (characters, etc) modeling at all, for instance. It also sucks balls at surface modeling, and any time I want to build a really elegant shape I will default to Rhino. It also does a terrible job working with files from other systems (and can't work with polygon meshes at all) so you still need a swiss-army-knife program like Rhino if you're dealing with multiple formats on a regular basis. Its rendering engine is mediocre and it doesn't have great compatibility with third-party tools. Its interface is full of stupid hacks where the programmers clearly glommed stuff together rather than planning anything out. But SolidWorks is still the Photoshop of CAD so if you plan to do anything serious you really need to bite the bullet and pick it up. *rhino is actually the best Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 07:08
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Where does freeCad sit on this? I'm pretty sick of cloud based cad now tbh.
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Sep 22, 2020 09:36
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Sagebrush posted:For instance, one of my favorites is that the equation editor won't accept a user-defined global variable called "thickness." If you try it, it will accept the name just fine, but when you try to assign a value it says "the equation is invalid." This is not to forgive this but lmao I actually know this one: it's because thickness is a reserved variable for sheet metal. It does suck that Dassault expects everyone to get their (also very expensive) training. Rhino does own bones. I'm really, really glad I bought a license to it before the other CAD programs because "Swiss Army Knife" is right. It'll eat up and spit out just about anything. I should actually get brushed back up on it.
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Sep 22, 2020 13:17
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Sagebrush posted:Solidworks is the worst 3D modeling program there is, except for all the others*. LOL. Basically. It's like why you can't name a file in windows "CON", "AUX", or "PRN" I need to do more parametric training, it would be super helpful to lots of my parts during the design phase.
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Sep 22, 2020 13:32
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I had to build a parametric product design suite inside Autodesk Inventor (rip to a real one, dying for F360s cloud profits) for a client a year or two back, it’s an incredibly valuable workflow to get comfortable with if you make a lot of derivative designs or do lots of work that all has the same overarching design requirements/constraints. the client made to-order steel wire products so it was a great use case, i mostly hung around their fabricators watching what they did and asking questions until i understood the implicit design rules they were following, and then built out the VBasic plugins to suit Just wish the client had picked SW or Rhino out of a hat when they bought their CAD suite for the next decade, but hey, it’s pretty transferable once you learn how a given ecosystem wants you to play Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 16:49
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Hello machinists! DIY Secret Santa signups are open! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3941260
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Sep 22, 2020 19:24
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Ambrose Burnside posted:I had to build a parametric product design suite inside Autodesk Inventor (rip to a real one, dying for F360s cloud profits) for a client a year or two back, it’s an incredibly valuable workflow to get comfortable with if you make a lot of derivative designs or do lots of work that all has the same overarching design requirements/constraints. the client made to-order steel wire products so it was a great use case, i mostly hung around their fabricators watching what they did and asking questions until i understood the implicit design rules they were following, and then built out the VBasic plugins to suit One of my big customers uses Inventor, and they're increasingly unhappy with it. Then again, SW hasn't added anything really "NEW" in a long time.
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Sep 22, 2020 21:08
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sharkytm posted:Then again, SW hasn't added anything really "NEW" in a long time.
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Sep 22, 2020 21:53
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taqueso posted:My mech eng friends taught me solidworks circa 2006 when I worked at a company that used it. Then I moved on and didn't touch solidworks for years. I used alibre/geomagic for minor cad stuff and it was a pretty decent SW clone mostly. Now it's 2020, I got the $40 solidworks thanks to EAA. And to my surprise, the solidworks UI appears almost entirely unchanged. I was excited for new great features and cool UI improvements but I'm not sure there really are any. Honestly, I consider that a positive (and a big one.) They've got a user-interface and workflow that works really incredibly well for >95% of what you'll probably need to do. I'd rather they focus on small incremental improvements than break something that works just in the name of innovation. The changes they make are pretty small, but there's always at least one or two things that make me sit up and go "wow, that's actually pretty handy." And it's always easy to incorporate that into my workflow without breaking a decade of muscle memory.
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Sep 22, 2020 22:23
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I don't feel like the interface is particularly good, but maybe I'm not deep enough into it. I had to manually bind shortcuts for things like sketch line and dimension. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?
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Sep 22, 2020 23:29
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Not necessarily "wrong" Probably the hardest thing to do with SWX is get the muscle memory down. If you do something and DO NOT move your mouse, a pretty good set of shortcuts show up. They're workspace dependent (e.g. surfaces vs sketch vs features) but they're really good. The S key will also do two things: 1) activate an in context shortcut menu for what SWX guesses you want to do next AND 2) brings a cursor up in the "search" toolbar in the upper right. You can start typing what you want to do and I'll come up. I used to do a lot of Rhino and Fusion just by typing commands, so maybe that'll help.
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Sep 22, 2020 23:38
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sharkytm posted:One of my big customers uses Inventor, and they're increasingly unhappy with it. Then again, SW hasn't added anything really "NEW" in a long time. iirc autodesk is actively removing functionality and retiring plugins from inventor with the latest editions because they want to get everybody onto F360 and depreciate the older non-cloud programs ASAP, id probably be unhappy too if i didn’t plan on switching over yet
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Sep 23, 2020 00:16
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SolidWorks massively increased the capabilities of add-ons, like circuit works, their pipe and cable routing, but I don't use any of that stuff. And yeah, I'd be pissed too. There's a reason I'm still using AutoCAD 2010. I have a legal license and they can't take that away from me.
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Sep 23, 2020 05:03
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SolidWorks hasn't added anything new to its basic modeling tools in over a decade. The vast majority of users, people who only use extrudes/cuts/revolves/patterns/holes, could still be using SW2005 today and they'd be perfectly fine. However, Dassault deliberately breaks backwards compatibility from version to version -- you cannot open a SW20 document in SW18, and there is no way to save back to an older format either. So you're forced to constantly upgrade whether you like it or not. I thought for sure that Autodesk was trying to eat SolidWorks' lunch with F360. They tried it with Inventor, but Inventor was just SolidWorks without any industry support (and the same price) so lol. Fusion could have done it if they'd kept it free for another few years at least -- long enough to really build a competitive feature set and get people attached to the platform. Fusion's CAM is leagues ahead of the built-in SolidWorks one (in fact the Fusion CAM is just HSMWorks, formerly a really good SolidWorks CAM plugin that Autodesk stole), its rendering is better, it has a T-splines-like freeform module that SolidWorks can't match, and its parametric modeling and assembly stuff was catching up. Even if they didn't capture the whole market, some competition for Dassault would be great. But no, Autodesk got greedy and IMO with the new restrictions on hobbyist use -- particularly the file management, which was always the worst part of the software -- they have now killed it before it had a chance. What a waste.
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Sep 23, 2020 05:20
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taqueso posted:I don't feel like the interface is particularly good, but maybe I'm not deep enough into it. I had to manually bind shortcuts for things like sketch line and dimension. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? Nah, that's kind of how it works. There's a big learning curve with Solidworks, but it's not just learning where the buttons are and what the hotkeys are. It's also about figuring out how you want to customize the interface to suit your preferences. It's really expected that you'll remap all the hotkeys, change the toolbar configurations, etc, to whatever you're comfortable with. Solidworks designed around people who use it as a full-time job who will take the time to tweak it to their needs: the default configuration isn't supposed to be what you use all the time, just a starting point. Also, try mouse gestures. I find them really intuitive.
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Sep 23, 2020 05:22
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sharkytm posted:SolidWorks massively increased the capabilities of add-ons, like circuit works, their pipe and cable routing, but I don't use any of that stuff. I really loving hate cloud based subscription software, should literally be a law against it.
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Sep 23, 2020 06:09
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Sagebrush posted:I thought for sure that Autodesk was trying to eat SolidWorks' lunch with F360. They tried it with Inventor, but Inventor was just SolidWorks without any industry support (and the same price) so lol. Fusion could have done it if they'd kept it free for another few years at least -- long enough to really build a competitive feature set and get people attached to the platform. Fusion's CAM is leagues ahead of the built-in SolidWorks one (in fact the Fusion CAM is just HSMWorks, formerly a really good SolidWorks CAM plugin that Autodesk stole), its rendering is better, it has a T-splines-like freeform module that SolidWorks can't match, and its parametric modeling and assembly stuff was catching up. Even if they didn't capture the whole market, some competition for Dassault would be great. Gotta say this is my impression too, they shot themselves in the foot with this. To me it also looked like competitors were taking notice, with Siemens changing their Solid Edge education edition to a more general community edition in 2020. The terms were veyr student oriented before but now it's more aimed at both students and hobbyists. IMO a change made to go up against F360.
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Sep 23, 2020 06:17
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Is this the thread where I'd ask my Fusion360 newbie questions or is there a thread more suited to that?
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Sep 24, 2020 21:02
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Martytoof posted:Is this the thread where I'd ask my Fusion360 newbie questions or is there a thread more suited to that? Here's fine
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Sep 24, 2020 21:09
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Been reading the autodesk forums and watched videos on this and... Is it just me? I mean for every person trying to defend Autodesk, or every video I am watching where they are explaining Autodesks decisions... I just keep getting angrier the more they try and explain? I started out as "meh I expected this to go to gently caress eventually after all", and now I've moved on to "gently caress you autodesk and all your defenders too". I think it's partly the constant explanations that Autodesk is a company and must act in their own self interest, but then turn right around and indicate that I cannot do the same, I must be understanding for some reason, the little people must be held to higher standards than big corporations. Well gently caress that. gently caress F360. gently caress Autodesk.
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Sep 26, 2020 07:12
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After slowly upgrading my 3018 engraver to run a laser on a 600x600mm carriage and never getting the frame rigidity good enough to keep y-backlash down.... I bought a Shapeoko XL. Now I'm going to cut aluminum parts to stiffen up the laser  Each individual part on this weighs more than the entire 6060 (minus spillboard). Like, the Z-axis is heavier, Y1 axis, Y2 axis, X-gantry aluminum extrusion....One thing I didn't realize is the Shapeoko doesn't have spindle control; that's 100% manual. I can work with that, it was just a bit of a surprise.
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Oct 3, 2020 14:38
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CorelCAD is $30 on the Humble Bundle. Windows and macOS compatible. No CAM plugin solution AFAIK, but if you're in the cold on macOS after Fusion's changes, it's worth having just as insurance. I picked it up myself. I haven't used it, but I've worked with mass producers who do, so it's capable.
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Oct 3, 2020 22:13
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Just bought a second hand Nomad 883 Pro with a bunch of tooling and a threaded table for $1000. I've been lusting after these for 3 years, but $2500 has always been too much to justify so I'm very excited. Turned it on and realized it was MUCH louder than my Proxxon MF-70, so $100 worth of 3/4" MDF and carpet foam later and hopefully I'll have a decent little sound dampening enclosure. Super excited to have more than 70mm x 40mm to interact with. I mostly use the mill to make microfluidic chips so this is going to be a very nice upgrade.
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Oct 5, 2020 02:51
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I got the trial of GWizard for a feeds and speeds calculator. Does 26000 RPM @ 3000/min sound right for a 1/8" single-flute cutter in HDPE/delrin? It seems REALLY fast. It's telling me 4mm max depth of cut with 1.27mm stepover; 550 mm/min helical ramp in. Finish pass is 1200mm/min .5mm stepover.
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Oct 5, 2020 12:23
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:I got the trial of GWizard for a feeds and speeds calculator. Yup. Delrin can be machined crazy fast. 100+ ipm and high spindle speed is how my machinist does it. Chip control is a pain on the lathe for sure, not so bad on a mill. Spindle speed with affect finish, so monkey with that to get an acceptable product. Check your outside corners too, high speed can chip them.
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Oct 5, 2020 14:10
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If you get ribbons do not put your fingers ANYWHERE near them until everything has stopped spinning. It apparently has a pretty high accident rate.
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Oct 5, 2020 14:52
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sharkytm posted:Yup. Delrin can be machined crazy fast. 100+ ipm and high spindle speed is how my machinist does it. Chip control is a pain on the lathe for sure, not so bad on a mill. Ok, so the cuts are looking great at low DOC, but my calculator says I can do like 4mm at a time. When I go 4mm (at same stepover) I get melting and the surface finish is garbage. Which direction do I go? Slower feed? Slower spindle? More cooling? I've got a vacuum pointed at it for chip clearing, but I can turn on air blast if I need to.
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Oct 5, 2020 17:13
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If the material is melting you obviously need more cooling. For plastics, I find that soapy water works very well. Some people use kerosene or WD-40. If you can't increase the cooling, then you decrease the heat by reducing energy input (spindle speed) or friction (depth of cut).
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Oct 5, 2020 17:25
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Think of it this way... the more volumetric material removal the more power it takes - IE heat going into the whole system. Spindle speed and movement rate are basically tied together, spindle speed and more DOC means more power going into the system. So up cooling, or try reducing speed and feed rate, or all three.
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Oct 5, 2020 17:27
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Sagebrush posted:If the material is melting you obviously need more cooling. For plastics, soapy water works very well. The shapeoko forums are telling me the correct action is "increase chip load" and get my MRR up to 40mm3. That is, amm, agressive.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:07
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Increasing the chip load will reduce heat in the part because you're moving further with each rotation, exposing the tool to more cool material instead of spinning in place and building up heat, and because the larger chips will carry away more heat. Assuming you have the spindle horsepower to do it (shouldn't be a problem with plastics) and the surface finish remains acceptable, yes, taking a bigger bite can be the solution. If you have no cooling right now, though, use cooling. Even just spraying the part down with soapy water from a spray bottle will help significantly.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:43
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:Ok, so the cuts are looking great at low DOC, but my calculator says I can do like 4mm at a time. When I go 4mm (at same stepover) I get melting and the surface finish is garbage. Which direction do I go? Slower feed? Slower spindle? More cooling? I've got a vacuum pointed at it for chip clearing, but I can turn on air blast if I need to. As has been mentioned, higher feed or slower spindle speed might actually help. Higher feed will put more heat into the chips, and might work. It's always a balancing act. Water works too, but makes a mess and needs to be cleaned off the machine. Vacuum+air is a good move and cheap to start with.
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Oct 5, 2020 20:36
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This thread is amazing and I can't wait to get my own CNC in the not-so-distant-futureTM
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Oct 5, 2020 20:50
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Well, I turned the feed rate up 50% (so now moving 6000mm/min on a full-depth slot with a 1/8" plastic-cutting bit) with 80PSI air blast. The chips are coming out and nothing's sticking to the bit, but surface finish is still all gummy at the top.
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Oct 5, 2020 21:14
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:Well, I turned the feed rate up 50% (so now moving 6000mm/min on a full-depth slot with a 1/8" plastic-cutting bit) with 80PSI air blast. The chips are coming out and nothing's sticking to the bit, but surface finish is still all gummy at the top. Photos/video? Upcut/downcut bit? Did you try air with the original feedrate? Back it down by 50%? How sharp is the tool? Plastics like a razor-sharp tool, at least on the lathe.
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Oct 5, 2020 22:47
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Same on the mill side for the sharpness. When you say the chips are coming out any chance they're doing a lap around the endmill first? Recutting those chips could cause what you're describing. Maybe back the depth off a bit? Recommend feeds, speeds, depth etc are a great place to start but at the end of the day finding what settings work is all that matters.
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Oct 5, 2020 23:12
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Yeah anecdotally I don't use full-depth cuts hardly ever, except in materials that are extremely well suited to machining like Renshape. I like doing multiple high-speed passes with a shallow depth of cut, round and round the part, followed by one full-depth profiling pass to remove the last .005-.010 and bring it to size. You have a CNC machine, let it do the work for you. If you need to do the full depth to save time and money on production jobs...well, just hire a machinist.
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Oct 5, 2020 23:26
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Ok, I cut some test zig-zag patterns at different feeds. All 1/8" depth (3.175mm, 1 tool diameter). I started at 4000mm/min and went all the way up to the machine's maximum rate of 10,000mm/min, increments of 200mm/min. Spindle RPM was set to 18,500 as recommended on the shapeoko forums. The sweet spot for cutting at that depth seems to be 7200mm/min. There's just the tiniest burr at sharp corners. Below~6200, I get long, stringy chips. Below about 5000 or so, stuff is sticking to the bit. Above 8600, the surface finish is garbage. The machine skips steps in X at 9800mm/min. Vacuum only, no air blast. Brand new single-flute up-cut bit. I'm going to try for some pockets now, instead of slots. Plastic is crazy.
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Oct 5, 2020 23:50
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