Vero increases integration between various Radan products.
Radan—a provider of sheet metal CAM software—recently announced its latest release, which contains a number of major upgrades.
This release takes major steps toward better integrating Radan’s CAM functions as well as Radbend, Radm-ax and Radtube functionalities. Radm-ax and Radtube use CLS licensing in this version, aligning them with other Radan products.
“Radan is actually a whole suite of connected products…so, technologically, it made sense to bring the products much closer together,” said product manager Olag Körner of this newest release.
One of the most important upgrades is the new side panel. 3D translation of the model is done at import. The user can now import material information and thickness. The new side panel, which appears on the right side of the screen, shows a “materials style” parts list culled from the 3D translation and can also make irrelevant parts such as nuts and bolts invisible.
The new release also provides users with tighter rein over the autotooling routines. The user can get as specific as needed on the areas of parts and nest to autotool.
“Sometimes designers create theoretical models, which may not be possible to make when they get to the press brake,” said Körner. Radbend 2016, part of the Radan suite of software, fixes this collision problem. The software flags issues with the designed part and changes it, simulating the modified part instead.
Similarly, the manual tool selection upgrade is designed to save users time by allowing them to use tools already set up on the machine. The manual selection bypasses the autoselection performed by Radan, which might not take previously set-up tools into consideration. It might be useful for future releases to have smarter autoselection tools.
The release places heavy focus on tube-based products and added nine new tools, including controllers or models, many of which integrate downstream with Radm-ax and Radtube. Radbend now also includes mirroring and rotation features for nesting features in tube-based designs. Another tube-based upgrade allows users to specify bevel angles to cut into tubes.
Overall, the release provides increased accuracy and saves users time-costly steps that were necessary in previous versions of the software.
According to Radan, this release comes at a time of unprecedented growth for the company, which claims to have 20 percent of the market share. The UK- based company recently expanded its team stateside and reported booming business.
About the Author
Sasha Sharma is a big data scientist and tech enthusiast. She has a background in science writing and holds a BS in biotechnology with an emphasis in bioinformatics from the University of California, Davis.
