Dolphin CAD/CAM

Yesterday I went to the harrogate ME show at, believe it or not, Harrogate

Just a heads up with no association but on the SMEE stand there are two demo's one by Geomagic design which is the new name for Alibre [ same product, new name ] and one by Dolphin CAD CAM.

Whilst talking to Dolphins gut yesterday I noticed they were doing a limited show offer on the software where the miling package was under £100 which is very good value for a full blown package, about a 1/4 of the normal hobby price.

For anyone who can't make the show here is a link.

Home

Offer is only valid for a week

John, how does dolphin compare to the likes of aspire - differ league in terms of price... I'm not going to need a cam package for a while but I guess offers like this don't come round too often? You've used dolphin for a long while right?

Joe,
Basically Dolphin is an engineering program and Vectric is a woodworking / sign making program.
You can draw in Aspire but it has limited CAD capabilities but the CAM side is very easy to learn and very quick.
Dolphin CAD has more capability but I feel it's far too clunky and prefer to draw for both Vectric and Dolphin in a CAD package I'm more at home with.

You get a far cleaner code with Dolphin than Vectric as you can fine tune it better but at the expense of more time programming. Vectric is quicker to program but has this tendency to wander around doing a bit here and a bit there.
for a one off it's not too bad as wasted machining time is far less than the time you would spend programming in Dolphin but if you are producing a series of parts then the programming time is well saved by the cleaner code.

I use both programs equally, quick simple jobs with Vectric and more complex jobs with Dolphin.

cheers John, might be worth the investment now then...