On Sunday 07 March 2004 20:43, Steve Blackmore wrote:
My point is, why all the struggling? We spend endless money on
Hardware & tooling but never think about CAM programs! IMO - Just as
important to have a decent cam proggy as all the rest of the kit!
Thats easy. Money. Or more to the point, unreasonable amounts of it.
Some of the CAM products are not being sold on their development costs, but
on 'what we think we can get away with'. Because a lot of CAM is sold to
industrial/business users, it is sold at a business/industrial price, and
most importantly a price that does not reflect the amoutn of effort that has
gone in to writing it.
Let me give you an example from plasma profiling software .. Take a package
that can produce a toolpath around a part (identifying the internal and
external contours) and add lead-ins ... then place them on a sheet for
cutting. How much to you figure that is going to cost? $500? $1000?? .. well
.. nearer $2000 is the answer, and thats if you are prepared to drag the
parts onto the sheet and position them with your mouse. Want it to place
them on the sheet automatically? double that price. And thats if it uses the
rectangular bounding box to work out how big the part is, if you want it to
us the 'true shape' of the part when packing into the sheet, add another
$1000 or more.
Now, as a software engineer, I know I could write a simple rectangular
nesting routine, have it tested and debugged in a day or so, so when someone
wants thousands of dollars for it, I begin to think hard about 'value for
money'. When you look at a lot of software you can get today for either very
little or even free, you begin to reallise that it is no longer a big ticket
item. Its a commodity. The CAM world is still holding out, going for the few
sales for big dollars approach, and they are going to get a hard landing.
Theres a couple of good free packages coming along nicely now, Qcad for
instance and sagcad look promising.
In short the CAM market is to a large extent ignoring the hobby/low end user.
There are a few software houses who have taken this on board (Dolphin with
its Mach2 offer for instance) and some who offer genuinley advanced and
impressive packages for a fair price ( Rhino 3D and Visual Mill for instance)
.. but theres still a lot offering rather basic packages at big ticket prices
(like almost all the plasma/gas/laser profiling packages) and thats a market
that is ripe for someone to come along, offer a decent package at a fair
price and clean up.
What will happen I predict over the next few years is that an open source
package will become good enough to attract a few commercial/industrial users.
When that happens it will beocme interesting. I'm looking at India and China
as being massive growth markets for this kind of project. They have lots of
skilled software guys, and a booming need for this type of product. What will
happen is some companies will pay some Indian developers to add functionality
to a open-source CAD package, to enable them to do some task more efficiently
and from there it will snowball. Its already happened in a lot of areas, I
predict cad/cam is an area ripe for it to happen next.
--
RapidCut CNC Technology
CNC Plasma Cutter
