I just tried it out in Autodesk Inventor 2016. It installed without difficulty and connected itself up to Inventor as an add-on, appearing in a pane. It wants a login before it will do anything. After login, it will price machined parts.
The minimum price for a machined part (a 2" x 3" x 0.5" piece of 6061 aluminum with no other machining) is about $95. The soonest available delivery date is 7 days away. The price goes down slightly if you select a date further in the future.
The plug-in will detect and report un-machineable situations, such as square-sided pockets and narrow slots into which a tool could not reach. Holes cost about a dollar each, and a machined pocket costs about $10-$20. Adding a pocket on the reverse side of the part, which requires a second setup, added about as much cost as a front side pocket, which leads me to suspect that the program doesn't figure out how many setups are needed.
Chamfering a top edge added another $100. So curved surfaces really cost. The plug-in doesn't give any hints on cost reduction, unlike eMachineShop. You don't get told the operation sequence; that's a black box to the user.
Overall, it seems like a useful basic machining back-end program. Has the feel of eMachineShop circa 2003.
The minimum price for a machined part (a 2" x 3" x 0.5" piece of 6061 aluminum with no other machining) is about $95. The soonest available delivery date is 7 days away. The price goes down slightly if you select a date further in the future.
The plug-in will detect and report un-machineable situations, such as square-sided pockets and narrow slots into which a tool could not reach. Holes cost about a dollar each, and a machined pocket costs about $10-$20. Adding a pocket on the reverse side of the part, which requires a second setup, added about as much cost as a front side pocket, which leads me to suspect that the program doesn't figure out how many setups are needed.
Chamfering a top edge added another $100. So curved surfaces really cost. The plug-in doesn't give any hints on cost reduction, unlike eMachineShop. You don't get told the operation sequence; that's a black box to the user.
Overall, it seems like a useful basic machining back-end program. Has the feel of eMachineShop circa 2003.