Hello,
Following Adrian's and Phil's comments, we are not really in the ProDESKTOP style 3D end of the market, our main program (2D Design) is intended to serve as an intro to CAD/CAM work. It has features you'd expect in say AutoCAD lite (or QCAD) but also some more illustration type features such as Corel (or SodiPodi). The point being that in the average secondary graphics class are children who might want to be engineers, architects, graphic designers, textile designers, etc etc... So we reckon they all need a basic grounding before specialising later. This was exactly my comment to our D&T chap. His point is that it's more of a design tool rather than a traditional CAD. The problem of course is that it's easy to design items that can't be manufactured (easily).
2D Design also has built-in drivers for the 2D and 2.5D machines we sell so you don't have to get involved in 'post-processing' just make a simple project. This was down to the step size and the path of the cutter rather than the
I used turbocad in the past (In my opinion better than the so-called industry standard and silly priced AutoCAD), but I've taken DTPro on and think it's brill. My camping trailer is a masterpiece and looks as cool spinning on the screen - with every nut, bolt and stud modelled - as it does sitting behind my Volvo :-) ( as you can see I do 'sad' and am happy to humiliate myself by declaring Volvo ownership) This is going the same way as the rest of IT in schools, no depth to knowledge (there he goes again, up on that horse!) project. The same file was output to all of the demonstrated machines. It may be that the different optimisations for each of the machines would have shown their strengths on different jobs.
The nearest I've seen on Linux is CAM Expert which is a commercial product from the same guy who produces the free QCAD, but ours is simpler to use. 2D Design runs quite happily under Wine, though there are issue printing via CUPS. Ed Lea hacked some new Wine code last year to enable our CAM machines to operate from parallel and serial ports, but I don't know if his code has made it to the official release. I have to say that pro desktop is processor, memory and graphics hungry, tweaking your graphics card can make it fall over. I'm using the granite version and it's not what you might call solid despite its monster price.
Adrian
Regards,
Phil Thane - Support Manager, TechSoft UK Ltd.
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