The DP Technology User Conference was recently held in San Diego, CA and it’s obvious that DP Technology has put their foot back on the gas with this release. This is also evident as many Mastercam shops are now adding DP Technology Esprit to do what Mastercam can’t do.
The following quotes are all from the DP Technology Confrence Procedings:
DP Esprit 2010 Will Feature:
Machining technology that is now “displayed in the Project Manager, which makes it easy to view and interact with the part model while the technology is being defined.” In other words, annoying pop up dialog boxes for Machining Technology parameters no longer block the model.
Much better Feature Recognition:
In my opinion the major enhancement in Esprit 2010 is the commitment by DP Technology to solid model Feature Recognition as the best way to program parts.
Stock Automation:
“How nice would it be to start a simulation at any step in the machining process without simulating the previous operations first? That scenario is a reality in ESPRIT 2010 with the implementation of the new stock automation engine. Now the user has better control over the state of the stock when starting a simulation. The stock automation engine offers the ability to start a simulation with the stock that results from the completion of all previous operations. In previous versions of ESPRIT the user could only start a simulation from the initial stock or from stock that was previously saved. This new mode eliminates the need to simulate all operations from the beginning or to save previous simulation states.
How it works:
When enabled, stock automation runs in the background to calculate the stock for each operation.
Stock automation is enabled on the Machining tab in the Options dialog
Start the simulation with the previous operation stock without using the “simulate from saved state” at any time.
The Stock will be used for the tool path calculation for the 3 Axis and 5 Axis Mold operations
What is stock automation?
The Stock Automation in ESPRIT 2010 is a new engine that will automatically generate a stock for each operation when the operation is created or modified.
When activated, the Stock Automation runs in the background on a second CPU (Core) when available and will simulate the material removal of each operation as needed by ESPRIT.”
Major enhancements to 3 axis surfacing and 5 axis surfacing toolpaths.
I’d like to see DP Technology get much better at marketing and employ experienced machinists rather than the mechanical engineers they use to love to hire straight out of school. This way DP Technology might actually get decent market penetration rather than just sales from those purchasing advanced mill / turn machines.
