Cabinet Design Software Recommendations?

[jdwykrent]

I'm looking for a recommendation for a low cost cabinet design program to use in a high school woodworking class. Any help would be appreciated.

[bleeth]

lowest cost would be Cabinet Parts Pro.
E-cabinets is free but you need to purchase a dongle to run it on a Shop-bot.
Both have plusses and minuses.
CP Pro is all about cutting parts and is low on graphics. It is designed pretty much only for cutting basic cabinets, although you can do them with a few different construction systems.
E-cab is more like the "big boy" programs like KCDW and/or Cabinet Vision.
Ryan Patterson, who developed CP Pro is a Shop-bot employee.

[ssflyer]

eCabinets is a great program, that will teach your students using a mainstream, higher end program, but as mentioned, you need a ~$1500 dongle to run from it directly. You can, however design some awesome cabinets and more, and still use the design specs to toolpath in Aspire, if you are willing to take the time.

Cabinet Parts Pro is a good, inexpensive alternative.

Cabinet Planner, which can be seen HERE (http://www.cabinetplanner.com/index.html)looks interesting and is cheap, but only outputs DXF files, so you would probably have to set depths manually in VCarve or Aspire. I haven't tried it, though...

[myxpykalix]

Ron,
I d/l'ed. installed, tried to open and it crashed but will try again later. It talked about downloading by 56k modem in instructions so it must be pretty old. I don't think even YOU are as old as 56k modems are you?:D

[Tim Lucas]

ecabinets is your best bet for teaching your students and even with the price of the dongle that's just over $100 a month for one year then its paid for - no monthly fees and if you need to sell the dongle you can get almost all your money back by selling it on here.

Tim

[ssflyer]

Jack,

My first modem was 300 baud :eek:, I thought I was hot stuff when I got my Hayes SmartModem running at 2400! :cool:

I downloaded the trial of Cabinet Planner early this year. Had some interesting features, like good 3D rendering (using Kerkythea), but I didn't really play with it that much.

For cabinets and closets I've done recently, I've used eCabinet systems and Alibre (which isn't cabinet software)

[chiloquinruss]

And those wonderful rubber cups! :D Russ

[jdwykrent]

Sounds like E Cab is the way to go... Thanks Guys. I have some research cut out for me now.