Mastercam Tech Tip: Mastercam Feedback and Suggestions

Mastercam Forums is the best place to request functionality, updates, and chat about all things Mastercam.

How do you submit a request or suggestion for Mastercam?
Provide feedback directly to Mastercam through the forums. The best CAM programs are developed from user suggestions, and Mastercam takes great pride in developing based on community suggestions. Learn how to access the Mastercam forum, find existing threads, or start a new thread.

Video Transcript:

Have you ever looked at Mastercam and thought, ‘I wish they would add this feature?’ Or maybe you saw something and thought, ‘Ooh I like this a lot, maybe they should apply it in other places.’

This sort of feedback is exactly what Mastercam is looking for, and there’s a great way for you to actually give that feedback directly to Mastercam.

Of course, we do get phone calls and emails from people saying they wanted a specific kind of enhancement, and that’s great, we love to hear that. But ultimately Mastercam does want to see these requests come directly from customers.

Their pride and joy is to actually build up this software around community suggestions. It’s a big deal to them. So I’m going to show you exactly how you can do that with an example.

I’m here in Mastercam, and in my parameters, if I go to my linking parameters, something that’s really awesome about 2024 is I have visual linking. This is super useful because it gives me clear visualization of exactly what’s happening with my linking. Now, I love this feature, but what I don’t like so much is that it’s only for hole-making. I could see this being hugely beneficial for almost any 2D tool path, or maybe I could even see this in a 3D tool path. For example, if we were to go to steep/shallow, I would love to see this visually represented so that I can clearly see what’s going on. I think that could be very useful.

So how do I tell Mastercam what I want to see in the software? It’s pretty simple.

First, we’re going to go to Mastercam.com. Then, in the upper right, go ahead and click the login button. If you have a Mastercam.com login go ahead and log in as normal. If not, you can create an account by clicking on the ‘Create One’ button and it’s going to ask you a couple of quick questions for setup. It’s easy and free, so why not do it!? (Check out 4 Benefits of a Mastercam.com account)

Once you have an account go ahead and log in, and then once we get past the login we’ll be at the main My Mastercam page. Now yours may look a little bit different because I am a reseller, but in the upper right we will find a dropdown menu item called communities. If you hover over that you can go to the forum, and then here at the forum, we can find information and discussion topics on everything Mastercam.  (Note: Access to the forums does require a linked Mastercam.com account.)

Before we go and post a new thread we should try to see if anyone else has posted about it, that way we’re not making it too complicated. So I’m going to type in linking, then do a search and see what we can find. It looks like I’ve got 500 results, so that’s probably too broad. Let’s go back and try something a little more selective.

Let’s try visual linking, and now we have eight results. We can parse through these results and see if there’s anything here that matches up to what we’re looking for. It looks like this post might be right. We can go in there and read through it. If this is what we’re looking for, we can do a reply at the bottom with a plus one. And if you want to add some extra detail go ahead and add some.

If no one else has posted about this, you can make your own thread. To do that go to the forum that you want to post to, it’s going to be the customer forum, then click on new topic. You can put a title and put in your description, be as descriptive as possible.

You have the option to notify me of follow-up replies via email. This is really neat because if someone is answering you and giving you plus ones, or if there’s someone at Mastercam who wants to have a little bit of back and forth with you and get some clarification, you can get an email about that rather than needing to go to the forums constantly to look for those replies. You can also allow for attachments up to 25 megabytes. Once you’re done just click submit.

Now your ideas have been submitted to Mastercam and they can take that and add it into the program, making it more robust for everyone’s use.

We hope that was helpful to you! Follow our Tech Tip series for more Mastercam tips and tricks.

If you’d like to learn more about Mastercam 2024, contact our sales team at (503) 653-5332 or email us at sales@mcamnw.com

Key takeaways (TL;DR)

• Mastercam Forums is the best place to request functionality, updates, and chat about all things Mastercam.
• Mastercam takes great pride in developing based on community suggestions.
• Submitting your ideas to Mastercam can help make it more robust for everyone’s use.
• Watch our Tech Tip to learn how to access the Mastercam forum, find existing threads, or start a new thread.

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