I Should Have Taken up Knitting

I’m having fun today. And by “having fun,” I mean, “pulling my hair out and fantasizing about beating software engineers with a two-by-six.”

I have been trying to get up to speed on CAD and CAM, and it has not gone well.

A long time back, I bought Alibre Design, which is a modest CAD program. The interface is nice, and the learning curve is not terrible. They offered it for a low price, like a hundred bucks. I forget.

I learned how to draw parts, and then later I made a CNC lathe. And I found out that Alibre Design does not produce drawings that can be used for CNC.

You can imagine how crazy that is. We are in the midst of a CNC/”Making” revolution, and the primary reason for the existence of CAD is to tell machines how to make stuff. Creating a CAD program which doesn’t work with CNC is like creating a bladder with no openings in it. It is a recipe for suffering.

Last year I went crazy and bought Dolphin CAD and CAM. This is a set of programs that will take you all the way to the lathe or mill, pretty much. And because they have a special module for lathes, I figured it was the way to go. And the price was merely exorbitant, not astronomical. A lot of CAD and CAM programs have four-digit price tags, which is why people torture themselves with open source crap that takes ten years to learn. Dolphin was three digits.

I did not realize how annoying Dolphin’s CAD interface was. Alibre has 2D and 3D in the same window. You draw a part in 2D, and then you view it and rotate it, easily, in 3D. Dolphin is just 2D, unless I missed something. It’s not that easy, looking at a 2D drawing and visualizing a 3D product, especially if you can’t draw more than one side of the part.

As far as I can tell–and I may be wrong–Dolphin forces you to make a different drawing for each side of a part. Imagine doing that for a complex part. Highly aggravating.

Alibre only exports drawings in AD_PRT and STL format, and these formats are dead ends. I found a way to convert STL to DXF using a program called Blender, and you can import DXF into Dolphin. I’ll show you why that was a waste of time.

First, an Alibre part I drew.

Now the drawing that came out when I exported to Dolphin.

That’s all you get. That side. The other dimensions are gone.

I had to call Geomagic (the Alibre people) today about a licensing problem, and–this will shock you–they wanted to sell me new software! Yes, I was amazed, too. I asked them about the crazy format problem, and the lady said they used to have a program add-on that allowed file conversion, but it was “no longer available,” meaning, “We do not want to give it to you.” Great. I never heard about it.

She said the latest Geomagic Design (successor to my program) was only $400. Yes, because to me, $400 is like three cents is to ordinary mortals. It means nothing to me. I scoff at it. But I let her send me a download link so I could look at it.

I fired it up, converted the drawing to a format Dolphin likes, and imported it into Dolphin Partmaster 3D.

Again, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I think PM3D is useless for CAD. I could not find any CAD tools in the program. I believe all it does is import files, let you view them, and export them. I opened the part file, and PM3D allowed me to export 2D drawings from it. I chose a view that would work for a lathe, and I sent it to Partmaster CAD, which is the 2D program. Here is what I got:

That is actually useful. I would have to trim it a little, because you’re not supposed to use both sides of a lathe profile in a CNC program. After all, the lathe only makes one cut, and it affects the entire surface of the round part. But it would work. I think.

Now I’m highly annoyed, but at least I can see a way out of this mess.

I don’t know what to do, but one thing is for sure: for the 15-day duration of the trial period, I will be using Geomagic to export everything in sight. Maybe I can find a cheaper solution before the time runs out. That would be nice.

If I can get this working, I’ll put the CNC lathe on its own cart and see if I can actually use it once in a while. That would be great.

After I give in and buy the new program–probably 10 minutes later–someone will tell me about a free program which does the same thing.

That can’t be helped.