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Several Regions have held meetups already, but others are being planned or are evaluating the interest. The Calgary Area Meetup is set for Saturday July 12th at 10am. The signup thread is here! Arbutus has also explored interest in a Fraser Valley meetup but it seems members either missed his thread or had other plans. Let him know if you are interested in a meetup later in the year by posting here! Slowpoke is trying to pull together an Ottawa area meetup later this summer. No date has been selected yet, so let him know if you are interested here! We are not aware of any other meetups being planned this year. If you are interested in doing something in your area, let everyone know and make it happen! Meetups are a great way to make new machining friends and get hands on help in your area. Don’t be shy, sign up and come, or plan your own meetup!
Solidworks for Makers @ CAD30.00 per year
- Thread starter Manfred
- Start date
Discussed a bit here. They use a different term for parametric modelling (or maybe its not, or switchable, or...??? that's where I get confused). But it kind of looks like they did the 'maker' version the right way. I'd be real interested to hear from someone fluent in SW who gave it a run & did a detailed comparison.
Not strictly true, I have a desktop icon to open mine and you can use "work offline" (link) to mostly avoid 3D Experience. I still regularly have to re-enter my login credentials though, and that is a pain in the butt. Also, installing the software was borderline kafkaesque for me and took multiple tries.
I had the same thing but it still opened 3DE when I clicked on it. Didn't know about the offline mode but it wouldn't have made a difference to my decision to ditch it. It was the overall experience, especially the CAM side that drove me away.
Aarknoid
Super User
not that it would fix your CAM issue but from what I heard offline mode is the full version solidworks interface without all the bloat.
I don't do CAM so I can't speak for how valuable 'integrated' is like F360. I always assumed one chooses CAD package for CAD specific reasons & same goes for CAM. Kind of like we also don't have 3DP slicers integrated in to CAD. You pass CAD files into Slicer of choice, it specializes in the 3DP specific stuff. Is that the right analogy?
That's the right analogy. The integration is nice because in Fusion, you design then switch to the CAM 'side' and the design is right there. If during the CAM process you want to make a design change, you just switch to the design side and make the changes. When you go back to the CAM side you just regenerate the tool paths and see if there are any changes. It's really seamless.
Integrated is REALLY nice because it lets you make model edits without having to re-do CAM (which is much more work than slicing a model). Also, once you get past 2.5D milling you will probably be doing things like modelling tabs and workholding which is way better in your preferred CAD than another software.
In the past, many of the best CAM softwares were add-ins for a variety of CAD packages so you could mix and match to your preference, and still have them "integrated". Unfortunately, there has been some pretty significant market consolidation so choices are much more limited now.
I really miss the free tier of HSMworks. I think it ended in 2020ish. It was basically the same as Fusions 2.5D CAM but as an add-in built into Solidworks or Inventor. HSMworks was the company that Autodesk bought to start their CAM integration. Even paid HSMworks will no longer be available for Solidworks as of 2028.