CAD/CAM supplier In-House Solutions, Cambridge celebrated its 25th anniversary recently with a one-day open house on May 10.
Ed House, president of In-House Solutions, says there have been significant changes in the past 25 years with CAD/CAM software.
“There’s seems to be more of a trend towards multi-axis, mill turn types of machines. Five axis machines have been in use for some time now, but we’re seeing more shops adopting the multi-axis types machines.”
Another growing area is the use of robotics in offline programming.
“We have a product line called RobotMaster and it’s an offline programming system for robots. Robot manufacturers want to take away some of the CNC machining and there is a lot of what CNC machines are being used for now that robot manufacturers say they can do with their programming. They need to make some modifications to robots and educate robot integrators. These robot cells can be used for cutting metal and composites. A lot of CAM developers are looking at some kind of offline programming for robots.”
House says networking of CNC machines is also growing and In-House “has been doing a lot of wireless communication for shops, especially in Alberta where it seems wireless is popular.”
Machine monitoring is now on In-House Solution’s radar, says House.
“We’re not doing this but we’re revisiting the concept and could be involved with machine monitoring in the next six months.”
