Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

"These automation integrators are going to adapt to do the on-boarding and training. I think we’ll see more of this — kind of a “blue collar programmer” — as more of the industry digitizes."

UK: HPGL and a bit of autocad. The lads (and ladesses) with the utility trousers and steel toecapped boots round here (motor vehicle supply chain) all know that. What else can you show us?

View on HN

Looking at this, I wonder if the real plan is to be acquired by Autodesk for the software. Autodesk Inventor is good, but its most available back ends for CAM are not that great. InventorCam is too manual, and SprutCam is smarter but too buggy. (I've used both.) HyperMill is supposed to be really good, but it's over $20K per seat, and unless you're doing 5-axis sculptured surfaces with a tool changer, overkill. Autodesk could use an entry-level fully automatic CAM package that did the whole job from model to machine tool for simple jobs and helped the user avoid fabrication problems at the design stage.

(Here's an example of Hypermill at work.[1] This is what the high end can do.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADqDMwQOc2w

Is Pro/Engineer still around? I used Pro-E when I was at University (along with Solidworks) at the time it was my preferred package.

I'm doing an ME degree right now, and they teach us both Solidworks and Pro-E (now Creo Parametric.)

If I remember the results of googling 'Creo vs Solidworks' correctly, Creo is better at handling really big assemblies and is used extensively in automotive industry. Most of my peers prefer Solidworks.

As I recall, SolidWorks took the majority of the market from Pro-E in the early 2000's by charging (IIRC) $4k when Pro-E was more like $20k.

I don't know what SolidWorks charges now, but I heard that the price is considerably more than $4k.

hyperMILL is absolutely fantastic for complicated projects, but like you said it is usually overkill.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com