CAM Assist, the first AI plug-in for CAM, is now available for Mastercam

July 25th, 2024 – CloudNC – a manufacturing technology company – today announces that its CAM Assist solution, which uses AI to generate machining strategies for 3 and 3+2 axis CNC machines, is now available for Mastercam users.

The new upgrade is available as an AI add-on for the Mastercam platform, one of the world’s most-used CAM software solutions, and means more machinists globally can use CAM Assist, bringing its efficiency and productivity gains to an even larger audience than before.

Theo Saville, chief executive and co-founder at CloudNC, said: “Mastercam has deep market penetration with expert machinists and workshops that serve specialist sectors, like aerospace and automotive, and our research suggests over 10% of CAM programmers worldwide have access to Mastercam. Now that CAM Assist is available to them, those users will benefit from CAM Assist’s ability to save the average machine shop over 1000 hours a year – changing the game for a large slice of the global machining sector.”

CloudNC is making the software available to North American manufacturing software resellers – including Shopware, CAD/CAM CONSULTING SERVICES (CCCS) and In-House Solutions – who will help to immediately bring the benefits of the software to Mastercam users in the US and Canada.

Bill Angsten, owner of Shopware, said: “Shopware is always looking for tools to help our customers boost productivity. To find something like CAM Assist to help automate 2D, 3D, and 3+2 Milling programming is a game changer. We’re very excited to partner with CloudNC, and look forward to saving our Mastercam customers countless hours of programming.”

Patrick Shelar, President at CCCS, said: “Mastercam has been a leader for so long because of how effective it is at making your job easier and your manufacturing process more successful. Cutting down programming and machining time as much as possible to ensure customer productivity gains is always driving Mastercam development teams.

“Now that the power of AI has boomed, it’s the natural progression to implement this into the manufacturing industry and CloudNC’s CAM Assist has arrived with the best utilization of AI technology we have seen in CAD/CAM. We are excited to bring this tool to our customers and be a part of the next evolutionary step in manufacturing.”

Neil Lang, Director of Revenue at In-House Solutions, said: “CAM Assist is poised to be the go-to AI for machinists around the world, because it effectively makes machining more accessible. We can’t wait to bring it to our Mastercam users and see the productivity gains that result from its deployment in Canada, and beyond.”

CAM Assist uses advanced computer science techniques and AI to generate intuitive machining strategies in minutes or seconds, depending on complexity, which could take CNC machine programmers hours or even days to manually create.

As a result, the amount of time it takes to program a CNC machine to make a component – a bottleneck in many factories – is greatly reduced, compared to the previous manual programming process, as is the time spent to estimate how much a new component will cost to program.

That gain enables manufacturers using CAM Assist to raise productivity and shorten lead times, while also estimating for more work, more quickly. CloudNC also recently announced the release of a new CAM Assist feature, Cutting Parameters AI, that automatically generates appropriate physics-based feeds and speeds for virtually any CNC machining scenario, in moments, resulting in productivity gains of at least 20%, and this feature is also available in Mastercam.

CAM Assist is available for Mastercam today, as well as other CAM packages, via www.cloudnc.com and via selected resellers.