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Best Of
Re: CAM for sheet goods/routers, what do you want?
My guess is CAM Studio is more like Fusion in that it's great for metal machining and fixtured parts. Fabber is much more geared towards flat/nested parts. Think plywood, plasma cutters, water jets, etc.
menu on android
pretty new to ONSHAPE and trying to get used to the Android app concept.
Is there a way to change the top toolbar in the android app for tablets?
The bar is empty except for the two buttons, and it's annoying to go in there every time just to measure.
maybe its possible to add a tool to favorites so it will always appear?
In addition, does anyone know if it is possible to set an action for the button on the S-PEN, or its too much to ask for?

Feature request: Filled toolbar on Android
Would be super useful to have and the toolbar is empty now anyways. Ideally the toolbar would be customizable, but I would already be happy if line, circle, rectangle and dimension are permanently there😂
CAM for sheet goods/routers, what do you want?
As you all know right now to nest/machine an Ohshape model like cabinets, sheet goods, sheet metal, etc you have to get your model out of Onshape and use a 3rd party CAM tool. If you could imagine your ideal CAM utility for Onshape what would it look like? What are some must haves, if you use another CAM tool for this sort of thing now what do you like about it, and what do you dislike about it.
Below are 3 examples of different CAD>CAM tools nesting and toolpathing complex models for sheet goods. I have my own opinions and thoughts on these, but I'm interested in hearing yours!
SketchUp/Fabber

Fusion 360

Mastercam:

@bryan_lagrange @MichaelPascoe I know you've weighed in on other discussion threads but I'd be interested in hearing you chime in here if you can spare the time.
Re: Recommend a CNC selection
Here is a custom feature that @jeff_brown304 made that will generate g-code directly within Onshape!
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/20285/introducing-camel-cam…
And Onshape will be releasing their CAM Studio in the future, should be soon now. However this will only be for pro users I think? Can't remember.
Re: How to sweep a profile along a curve and maintain its orientation with respect to one plane?
Okay, I have worked a little more on it. For anyone else trying to create a marble works it seems like the actual best approach is to do two sweeps, one after the other.
The first sweep will create a surface along which the track can run. This sweep uses lock profile direction with the top plane as the direction. This ensures that at each point the line on the surface perpendicular to the curve is also parallel to the top plane.
The second sweep creates the solid. This is created using the desired marble carrier profile. With this sweep, you lock the profile face to the surface you just created.
The benefit of this approach is that at each point along the curve, in the plane perpendicular to the curve, the cross section of the sweep has the same profile as it does in the original sketch. (If we were to do this step first with lock profile direction, then the cross section of the vertical plane that is perpendicular to the curve in xy would have this property, which in the case of extreme curvature could distort the actual cross section along the direction of marble travel).
Now, I don't know how well this would work for really sharp curves — but I'm not sure Onshape could really help with that because the calculating where the marble will be on the track is a physics question, not a shape question. I think for reasonable shapes the approach described here will be adequate.
Re: Recommend a CNC selection
Thanks to both of you forr taking the time to provide well thought out answers for me. When I find the solution, I will post.
Regards,
Wayne
Re: Improvements to Onshape - December 13th, 2024
Thanks for this valuable update.
Already been putting the curve approximation tool to good use.
Re: Rethinking SolidWorks
[edit]Ah,I see by the dates I may be too late. @jay_kinsinger What did you decide?
As an educator,
- The tech support is good and gets back quickly, but I've never phoned them for modeling support! (they might on the educator enterprise, not sure)
- At present CAM is not offered by Onshape, but is pending, but may not be available to one and all, just enterprise users. I'm not sure if this includes education enterprise.
The things which I love about onshape (let me count the ways..)
- I don't ever have to persuade my nice IT dept to install or update it, ever. (occasionally i have to ask them to whitelist the domain to stop registration emails getting blocked).
- I can share things instantly with colleagues and students, no files to send.
- It runs on a Chromebook or Raspberry Pi 5.
- I can set up classes and assignments.
- I can jump into a student's document and follow what they are doing, in real time, and help, by interacting with their model.
- It's pandemic proof.
- The interface is more accessible, I think, than other CAD I have used.
- It saves automatically.
- Marking: I get one link per student. All the stuff is in tabs in one document. I don't spend hours downloading files and opening them!
- One of the devs made me a Santa feature script which generates present boxes! (you can find it in the what's new thread).
Re: [Chatbot Copilot] - We Built a FeatureScript AI Assistant That Outperforms ChatGPT
I think something like this is inevitable. It's just a matter of when…
I think many non-featurescript coding Onshape users are technical enough to create a featurescript without understanding the syntax if it could be coded with natural language. And LLM's are the intermediary layer to make this happen.
Agree with Simon and Evan that this will eventually need to be integrated into Onshape.
for the non-FS-Coding lot you're looking at problem urgency (Coelen scale) two or three. not an easy sell.
for professional coders; IF their productivity would indeed go up a lot, it would be an easy sell indeed. question is how many are out there. probably urgency 5.
I think a freemium model (so people can experience the benefit) with limited tokens, a few subscription tiers with more tokens each and the ability to buy tokens separately for irregular users would be a beautiful model (sorta like OnScale).