I use Dolphin for my lathe, I had to do a lot of modifications to the post processor but that was because my lathe has front and rear turrets. If using a normal lathe the standard post processor for Mach that comes with Dolphin should be fairly good.
I am not a huge fan of the CAD side of Dolphin, its a bit clunky when you have been used to other CAD but it does work well once you get used to it.
Dolphin do hobby pricing so are usually quite competitive and as there are not a lot of options out there for lathes you cant really get much more for the same price. I think I was around £250 for my Turn module and a Dongle. You dont need to go with a dongle which would chop about £50 to 75 off the cost but it means you can only use on one computer if you dont and it needs internet connection, with the dongle I can have Dolphin on any computer and as long as I have the dongle plugged in it will produce code.
I was searching for a long time and had tried all sorts for the lathe, I really liked FeatureCAM but at the £2500 I got quoted it was too expensive for me.
I tried the Demo of BOBCAD but couldnt get the hang of it as there was no manual and when I asked them they showed me a screenshot of the part done but no explanation of how to do it was forthcoming so I gave that a miss. Other thing about them was I got pestered for about a year with phone calls all the way from America, they just wouldnt take no for an answer, eventually they gave up though
Hood
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