In such cases, support would play one of 2 tunes: “That’s another module you need to pay for” or “We’ll escalate that to development as a bug”. Every time I attempted to use Edgecam in anger, it would not produce the expected results. Overall: The initial cost of ‘perpetual ownership’ plus the post processors was to be written off against years of generating income. Is this paranoia at its best or just bad planning? I guess that’s what you get when you purchase these fragmented software companies and attempt to ‘shoe horn’ them into a “one solution”. On top of this, the tool management was based in Microsoft SQL Server, which added another layer of complication when sharing and performing off-line backups. The ‘Licence Manager’, to grant such privileges, was so finicky and required VPNs along with my customised batch scripts and mapped drives to achieve remote working. I chose the ‘network licence’ over the ‘dongle’ option as I needed to be able to run the software from wherever I was working. In addition to these hurdles, their ‘code protection’ was on another level.
However, in order to modify the posts that we had already paid for, I had to be granted special licence to use their “Code Wizard”. This involved filling out an extensive report on each machine’s G-Code capabilities for their post creators to do the magic :o To my surprise there were no ‘off the shelf’ solutions, or ones that could be tweaked. The linking between the 3 proved to be fairly tenuous.Īll post processors had to be ‘customised’ especially for your machine, incurring extra expense. I guess that’s what you’re paying for :!Ĭons: The whole Edgecam CAD/CAM experience appeared to be straddling 3 separate applications: ‘Part Modeler’, ‘Edgecam’ & the tool-path checker ‘Simulator’. I adapted to it quickly, although it had some very strange quirks, which over time I got used to working around.Įven though the company went through a few changes from Vero through Planit to Hexagon, the support team were great and fairly responsive. I loved “Part Modeler” (spelt that way), as it enabled me to dream up parts in my mind and create solid parts. After about 6 months, we finally decided upon Edgecam, as it appeared to be the one that would suit all our Mazak machines and our budget. Pros: Marie Sparshatt Ltd, as a small sub-contract machine shop, in 2013 we set out to review various CAD/CAM packages.
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