Despite of the high development and dissemination of Numerical Control (NC), the programming of machine tools remains a hard task in some companies. This fact is confirmed by a low usability of some NC interfaces and the difficulty to integrate them to an upstream system, such a CAD one. In this paper we address this problem, taking with scenario small companies which still use manual programming and supply low complexity geometrical parts. For this group was developed a low cost software that allows a PC-based programming, instead of a direct one. This software was based on programming features and directed to a specific CNC syntax. It was demonstrated that the proposed alternative leads to a significant time reduction when compared to manual programming. Furthermore, its learning curve is smaller than that observed in high-end CAM's.
Technology management; machining and CNC programming
