Barrel Cam profiles can be calculated by MechDesigner

MechDesigner can generate the cam profiles for Barrel and Globoidal Cams.               Download Example

Any mechanism can be set up with a barrel cam driving it.  Of course, the motion design can be done on the tooling that is being driven.  The cam profiles are generated as a series of points representing a surface, the density of which can be specified.  These can then be directly exported to SOLIDWORKS so that a complete cam can be generated in SOLIDWORKS by pressing 2 or 3 buttons.

The exported profile is as as accurate as compute machine accuracy will allow.  When the profile is imported into SOLIDWORKS, a 'Non-Rational-Uniform-B-Spline' (NURBS) is fitted to the data.  This process gives errors in profile of less than one micron (depending on number of points). SOLIDWORKS can then generate a Step file so that the cam can be machined using a suitable CNC cutting machine.

In the example, the Cam has been re-imported from SOLIDWORKS back into MechDesigner for display and checking purposes.