Geometric Technologies Releases CAMWorks 2008

By DE Editors

Geometric Technologies, Inc. (formerly TekSoft) of Scottsdale, AZ, released CAMWorks 2008 with advances in 3-axis milling functionality; cutting strategies for 2-5 axis milling, turning, and wire EDM; and improved speed and toolpath reliability for multiaxis operations and improved simulation speed and quality.

Other features include adaptive roughing to cut using the full depth of the tool and safely run your machine at optimum speed — this can reduce machining time up to 40 percent; Z Level/Constant stopover combination operation for machining steep and shallower slope areas in one toolpath; advanced helical milling strategies; additional control for improved pencil milling; new methods for defining Rapid plane; and entry point control for roughing.

New capabilities in 2.5-axis milling include offset roughing, contour spiral lead-in, improved contour milling in corners for high speed machining, and arc fitting for faster, smaller toolpaths. Faster Automatic Feature Recognition (AFR), additional detection of hole conditions and added functionality for local feature recognition make AFR even more powerful.

In a second announcement, Geometric Ltd. (Mumbai, India) released version 2.1 of GeomCaliper for Pro/ENGINEER, focusing on enhanced reporting with a mechanism for thickness analysis results to capture multiple critical regions along with their static image snapshots in one report now; a customizable color band; in sphere method for thickness analysis, user can opt to view contact distance between touch points rather than diameter of sphere.

Enhancements in critical region analysis tool include the ability to quickly locate critical regions outside of allowed thickness range, setting default options to view region or clipped section at predefined angles, turning animation on ‐ off during critical region analysis, and defining or modifying parameters like status, color, review comments on multiple regions at same time.

Plus, the company says, computation time is reduced by up to 30 percent, and visualization performance resulted in 150 percent improvement in the frames per second (fps) rate.

Version 2.1 of GeomCaliper for Pro/ENGINEER supports 32-bit as well as 64-bit Windows XP OS. A free 15-day free evaluation of V21 is available from Geometric.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.