Inside hyperCAD-S

An interview with Roberto Ciarloni, Technical Director at Open Mind CAD CAM Technologies Italia S.r.l.

Please tell us more about the new CAD system hyperCAD-S.

Finally a CAD package targeted towards the requirements of CAM users. We now have a truly integrated CAD-CAM solution as both environments were created and developed together in response to the requirements and issues of thousands of Open Mind customers. Previously, the two environments exchanged data with a limited degree of integration using the customary interface. We now have a single environment that shares the database and functionality right from the very start.

Furthermore, features in previous CAD applications were almost always designed with the require­ments of the designer in mind, despite the fact that the actual operators may see things quite differently and require functionality that speaks their own language.

Open Mind is known in the market for its CAM software package, so what drove it to develop a CAD platform?

We ought to explain that we are presenting a CAD product that is strongly targeted towards CAM users. Open Mind does not intend to develop general purpose design software. The objective of the company is to offer a quality professional package. We certainly do not want to enter a 3D design software market that is already saturated with well-known inter­national companies.

What does the product development mean for the integration process of CAD and CAM?

We were able to take advantage of the simultaneous development of the new version of our CAM system hyperMILL and the next generation hyperCAD-S software. By carrying out this work simultaneously, we were able to redesign the entire workflow needed to define the tool flows in the CAD model and further define the data and functions needed to optimise work and achieve superior results. It goes without saying that Open Mind continues to support the inte­gration of hyperMILL with other CAD tools such as Solidworks and Autodesk Inventor.

What about the interoperability of hyperCAD-S?

One of Open Mind’s main objectives was to implement a software package compatible with the main CAD programs currently on the market. hyperCAD-S can be interfaced with models created with PTC Creo, Siemens PLM Solutions NX, Dassault Systémes Catia, Solidworks software etc. It can be completely integrated both with respect to formats and geometric data and features.

Please summarise hyperCAD-S in a final statement.

hyperCAD-S code was created from scratch utilising twenty-first century archi­tecture and components, free of legacy technology. Open Mind's CAD software is therefore in a better position to support 64-bit multi-core CPUs and the GPUs in the new graphics cards. It is also based on an SQL database and supports Asian languages. In short, it is a modern archi­tec­ture both in terms of the hardware and the software.