It takes hours for a reason.
Traditional CAM software was built for external shapes: contours, pockets, profiles. It was never designed for the inside-out world of hydraulic manifolds, where the action is all internal: a grid of precisely intersecting holes, cavities, and ports with tolerances that don’t forgive mistakes.
When you load a 3D model into general-purpose CAM, it has to guess. It does feature recognition and tries to look at geometry and infer what kind of hole it’s looking at. If it gets it wrong, you get the wrong thread, the wrong counterbore, the wrong sequence. You catch it in review. Or worse, on the machine.
So, you slow down, you check every hole. You run the simulation; you run it again. Four hours is a good day.
HydroCam: built for manifolds from the ground up
HydroCam doesn’t recognize features. It reads them. Because it works directly with HydroMan - PARO Software’s manifold design tool, it already knows what every hole is, its exact depth, diameter, coordinates, and cavity type. There’s no guessing or recognition step to validate.
The core concept is the library. Before you program a single manifold, you build a set of sequences - reusable machining recipes for each type of hole you cut. A C10 cavity sequence. A Sun 11A sequence. An O-ring groove sequence. You define them once: which tools to use, in what order, with what feeds and speeds, for which material, on which machine.
That setup is work, but you only do it once.
After that, you load your HydroMan model, tell HydroCam how you’re fixturing the block, and it matches every hole to a sequence automatically. It interleaves the operations intelligently, all center drills first, then the through drills, then the form tools - minimizing tool changes and respecting the sequencing rules you defined. No hole gets machined before the hole it depends on.
You then review, adjust if needed, and export in G-code. That’s it. What used to take four hours now takes ten minutes.
Your knowledge, encoded
There’s a second problem that most shop owners don’t talk about out loud: what happens when your best CNC programmer leaves?
In most shops, the knowledge of how to machine a manifold - which drill goes first, what pilot hole you need before a large bore, how to handle crossing holes that are off-center, lives in one person’s head. When that person calls in sick, production slows, but when they leave, it’s a crisis.
HydroCam makes that knowledge portable. When your experienced operator builds the library, they’re not just setting up software, they’re encoding decades of machining know-how into a reusable system. The next operator, or the new hire, doesn’t start from zero. They start from your library.
The library becomes a company asset.
Full control, not a black box
HydroCam doesn’t take over. It accelerates what you already do well.
You define every sequence. You set every feed and speed. You choose which tools are available for each job. If a specific tool isn’t in the magazine today, you exclude it and HydroCam regenerates the program without it, on the fly. If you want to reorder operations for a specific manifold, you drag and drop. If a hole needs a non-standard approach, you override the defaults.
The software supports 3-axis and 4-axis machines. For 4-axis setups, it handles tombstone pallet mounting and lets you optimize which faces are machined in which rotational position - critical for manifolds with crossing holes that need to be drilled in the right order to prevent drill deflection and breakage.
The bottom line
A CNC machine that isn’t cutting is costing you money. Every minute it waits for a program is a minute it isn’t earning.
HydroCam doesn’t replace your machinists or your process. It removes the programming bottleneck that sits between your HydroMan design and your machine running. You get faster time to first cut, standardized programs across your shop, and a library that gets more valuable the longer you use it.
From hours to minutes. That’s the offer. If you want to learn more please visit our product page or watch this video.
