Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

For me, the one-time purchase price of Alibre and Vcarve makes more sense for someone retired. I look at it with a 10-20 year lens as for the total money spent. Fusion's current price increases makes me sense that I chose correctly, but to each his own.

kb58 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2024 12:41 pm For me, the one-time purchase price of Alibre and Vcarve makes more sense for someone retired. I look at it with a 10-20 year lens as for the total money spent. Fusion's current price increases makes me sense that I chose correctly, but to each his own.

Obvs it depends what you are using your CAD and Acorn for, how you answer the question. Those of us who are operating lathes and 4 axis mills have a much more limited choice of CAM than if we were using plasma cutters and routers.

If you don't need integrated CAM and you want powerful CAD that doesn't even cost $38.50, try Solid Edge from Siemens. It is a professional mid range competitor to Solid Works, Inventor, Creo etc but is free for lifetime for amateur use. I used it for several years and particularly liked the "Synchronous Technology" parametric direct editing. It doesn't use a history tree although you can turn it on if you prefer. It also has excellent tutorials and training exercises to help you on your way.
https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/ ... ty-edition

The downside of SW, SE, Onshape, Alibre etc is that CAM extensions / addons for lathe and 3-4 axis mill are grievously expensive which is where Fusion tends to win out.

Hi,

Solidworks is available for Veterans for US$20/year. It is the professional version with all the tools. The restriction is that it's the educational license and not for commercial use. A long time ago, I bought an Alibre Expert license. Then when they initially went out of business, the online license server disappeared and left users unable to run the product. After fiddling with FreeCAD, I climbed on the Fusion train knowing in my heart of hearts, that it was not going to remain free. When Alibre arose from the ashes, I paid the nominal fee they asked to obtain the current version with dependency on a license server. Unfortunately, the affordable CAM options for Alibre are limited. And we are back to a pricey subscription model for updates/bug fixes. Alibre has some features that are more friendly than Solidworks, and for drawing the user interface is not as cluttered. I have buckled down and learned basic Solidworks. The CAM integration is great, and I'm not stuck with a several hundred dollar bill annually.

TopQuarkDoc wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2024 3:19 pm The CAM integration is great, and I'm not stuck with a several hundred dollar bill annually.

What CAM are you using with SW? At one point they were giving HSM Works 2.5D for free with SW but then HSM was acquired by Autodesk and it now forms the CAM elements of Fusion and Inventor. I'd assumed the remaining functionality in SW would be rather limited compared to the evolving Fusion version but perhaps there is an alternative function available?

Note that the full feature Fusion CAM still comes with the free version but the main difference between it and the paid for version is the rapids (limited to the same as the feed rate) and only one tool per operation. All other features are available apart from the ruinously expensive "extensions" which I can live without.

Solidworks CAM which is basically CAMWorks. It's included with the Veteran's version of SW.

Oh man I am all over that solid works for veterans......Does solid works have a turning PP that will work with Acorn though?

CNC Keith has told me that the fanuc pp work with centroid. Hawkridge systems made a free centroid mill pp, only 3 axis, that is on their website for free. You might want to ask them if they will generate one for a centroid driven lathe

I've been using Solidworks since 2001 when I got sick of PTC and the change to Wildfire which wasn't very firey or wild, it was just a hopeless user interface rehash of ProEngineer which I think is now Creo. Anyway, the standard licence has Solidworks CAM which will do 2.5 and 3 axis milling, but won't accept configurations for any rotary axes. They are $$$ to add in, and of course 4 axis is one upgrade, then 5 axis is another wallet full of cash and ongoing support payments.

The flip side is the Hawk Ridge website 3 axis PP works very well for Centroid. I use this for rotary axis stuff by cheating and doing my CAD models as flat/developed, then scaling the Y axis to 360mm, post process it, then use Notepad++ to find/replace Y with A (my primary rotary axis). 360mm = 360 degrees you see so that then gets round the no rotary in the PP.

If you are feeling confident and brave, you can write your own Solidworks CAM PP in UPG-2 (do a google, free download) and create the ctl file etc. I haven't had time to get into that yet but it would be nice to get at least a 4 axis Solidworks CAM licence and sort out the PP. Work in progress!

Just to be clear, SolidCAM and Solidworks CAM are two different things. Solidworks CAM comes with Solidworks. SolidCAM is an independently produced CAM package for Solidworks.

Https://solidcam.com

tblough wrote: ↑Sun Jun 15, 2025 5:17 pm Just to be clear, SolidCAM and Solidworks CAM are two different things. Solidworks CAM comes with Solidworks. SolidCAM is an independently produced CAM package for Solidworks.

Https://solidcam.com

Yes you are right, too easy to get them confused, I've edited my post above to make it clear I was talking about the Solidworks CAM