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Anybody have an open source post for a 3+2 Mazak VCU500A-5X?


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 Long story but I compensated a guy who doesn't apparently have time to develop the post we we paid for.  I was looking for a 2015 VCU 500A-5X post capable of 3+2 machining.  The 500A-5X is a Y aligned tilt axis machine, so the trunion tilts to the left as you look into the cabinet.  

We're dealing with a new programmer and a backlog of work so we haven't run the Mazak VCU for 2 months, and as long as it's not needed, we have been looking for the possibility of an open post.  

I had one subcontractor built for a 4th Axis Doosan DNM5700S, so I know sometimes people have a post that is able to run on anyone's sim.    That's got pros and cons- pro- there is no maintenance payment on that post, con, you need a contractor to pay for edits or the knowledge to edit it yourself.  I had a good experience with our first contractor post, and I sort of liked the experience.  

 

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33 minutes ago, AGreen5 said:

 Long story but I compensated a guy who doesn't apparently have time to develop the post we we paid for.  I was looking for a 2015 VCU 500A-5X post capable of 3+2 machining.  The 500A-5X is a Y aligned tilt axis machine, so the trunion tilts to the left as you look into the cabinet.  

We're dealing with a new programmer and a backlog of work so we haven't run the Mazak VCU for 2 months, and as long as it's not needed, we have been looking for the possibility of an open post.  

I had one subcontractor built for a 4th Axis Doosan DNM5700S, so I know sometimes people have a post that is able to run on anyone's sim.    That's got pros and cons- pro- there is no maintenance payment on that post, con, you need a contractor to pay for edits or the knowledge to edit it yourself.  I had a good experience with our first contractor post, and I sort of liked the experience.  

 

No, but your more than welcome to work on the Generic 5 axis post and get it setup for your needs. I quit doing this years ago and leave post work like this up to the professionals. I will do what I need for customers when needed, but for other things pass it back to them.

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Like Ron said, it is possible to get the generic 5 axis post to output the correct code, if you are a post guy go for it, if not, do yourself and your machine a favour, buy it from one on the many post suppliers. I doubt anybody will give you this post for free as these thing take an immense amount of time to produce and test.  Just my 2 cents worth.

 

Attached is a piece of sample code to work from.

PEANUT-PART-2.EIA

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https://www.inhousesolutions.com/

The people who host our web forum (emastercam), happen to have an entire staff of people dedicated to writing amazing Post Processors.

https://postability.com/

Dave Thompson, the owner of Postability, is also a great source (2nd quote), for a bespoke Post Processor which will meet your exact needs.

 

 

 

 

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I got the post for our VC300A-5X from Postability.

A couple tweaks and it's posting clean code....

Needing G68 Plane Rotation, DWO support and high speed plus other options,  was the best thing I could have done.  I didn't have time to develop a post.

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On 12/30/2019 at 1:23 PM, 5th Axis CGI said:

No, but your more than welcome to work on the Generic 5 axis post and get it setup for your needs. I quit doing this years ago and leave post work like this up to the professionals. I will do what I need for customers when needed, but for other things pass it back to them.

A guy on this forum who's kind of a friend of mine was working for us and took a job somewhere else for more pay and he arranged a deal to trade services for a post as he was getting out of here, so we paid a professional for the post, it just hasn't been supplied and it's been 2 months so I'm unsure of whether he was being totally ethical with that arrangement.  He's also a dealer sim holder working for a reseller so he's not actually a reseller but he's the next thing to one.  

 

I'm not here to call him out, so I was just putting this out there since the current programmer here, is asleep in my office on the job and hasn't gotten to that machine yet.  I'm not going to bother waking the programmer up.  He's an adult.  

 

So I understand how the post looks stupid but we're not idiots, and I would have bought the post from a reseller if it weren't for a post writer arranging a trade without solicitation.  The post writer had literally been outputting files to the machine so I figured I wouldn't have to communicate with a post writer or reseller since the writer would be a guy possessing intimate knowledge of the machine from 7 months working here with it.  

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3 minutes ago, AGreen5 said:

A guy on this forum who's kind of a friend of mine was working for us and took a job somewhere else for more pay and he arranged a deal to trade services for a post as he was getting out of here, so we paid a professional for the post, it just hasn't been supplied and it's been 2 months so I'm unsure of whether he was being totally ethical with that arrangement.  He's also a dealer sim holder working for a reseller so he's not actually a reseller but he's the next thing to one.  

 

So I understand how the post looks stupid but we're not idiots, and I would have bought the post from a reseller if it weren't for a post writer arranging a trade without solicitation.  The post writer had literally been outputting files to the machine so I figured I wouldn't have to communicate with a post writer or reseller since the writer would be a guy possessing intimate knowledge of the machine from 7 months working here with it.  

I was not referring to you as incapable of working with the Post. I have dealt with the same situation your dealing with. At this point might need to go back to the dealer and tell them you need a working post and move on. You have a job to do and need the tools to help you do it.

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1 hour ago, 5th Axis CGI said:

I was not referring to you as incapable of working with the Post. I have dealt with the same situation your dealing with. At this point might need to go back to the dealer and tell them you need a working post and move on. You have a job to do and need the tools to help you do it.

I might.  First I have to get a programmer here capable of producing in our shop a need to use the 5 axis machine.  I have my hands full with good machinists, steady work, and 5 multi-axis mill turn lathes.   I purposefully don't touch mills because I want to keep my wife from divorcing me and I have to be home a few hours a day to make that likely to be an outcome.  I have an open source post for a doosan mill, so I figured someone might have one for the Mazak, maybe not.  

I figure if it comes to needing it, we'll realize my friend robbed me and we'll buy the post from the reseller that will put the machine at greater risk for a crash etc.   I would never have agreed to a trade for a post, if the resellers could sell you the most developed post for a machine, but typically they sell whatever basic thing comes off the shelf and the development is case by case and that leaves uneasiness in all post purchasing situations.  I can't guaranty we'll easily identify an issue, or effectively communicate it, or that it will be easily understood and worked out so a post from a re seller might cost a machine crash and repair. 

I've been in situations in the past where I buy a machine from a machine tool manufacturer, whos support people tell me they have a bulletproof post, and I've asked to buy it, and they tell me they can't sell me that product, and Mastercam can't either, and that sucks.   Customers want the best working product, not a building block to one.  If I'm going to have a building block it may as well be free, so I can try to give my friend some help not being a thief, so I can have a good memory of the guy. 

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16 hours ago, AGreen5 said:

if the resellers could sell you the most developed post for a machine, but typically they sell whatever basic thing comes off the shelf and the development is case by case and that leaves uneasiness in all post purchasing situations.

This quite simply is you misunderstanding a great many things....

Not ALL machines hit the floor set up the exact same way....point in fact again, our VC300A-5X....the guy who installed it, he defined the axis definitions in the control wrong...We spent a month chasing issues, when it was finally the post writer who finally said, Woah, something isn't right with this machine set up."

Short of the long of it, we had to have Mazak come back and set the machine up ALL OVER AGAIN.....

You are very unfair to resellers and post writers and seem to have little comprehension of how machine tool builders and their AE's do things.....

Working for a reseller for more than a couple years, I personally have gone into shops and modified posts for specific machines and left with the post working perfectly....tried to use that post on the SAME EXACT model of the a machine and lo' and behold, it didn't work....it needed a ton of modifications. I have taken proven posts and sent them to people not unlike you only to get it back with them claiming it didn't work. The reality, they NEVER even tried it...it posted out the code, they looked at it and said "nope, that's not right", again, never having even tried it....I was in North Carolina once at the Okuma facility with a group of resellers, we we asked why we had 9+ different posts for a single machine.....reason being, every AE, differing options, customers wanting code to "look" a certain way, even though it works another way.....at the end of the day, it's a customer driven issue.  What works for another person doesn't work for someone else, so you start with a good generic and dial it in to what specific customer wants.

JM2C YMMV

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I don't know that it's being unfair to say, that buying a post in my experience is about 25-30% likely to be a good working post at the time of purchase.  There aren't really a lot of people who are qualified to make them right (its high level application work to do that), and they have to be right in order to work well, so it's not fun to buy or need a post.   Maybe it would be good to develop a software module that edited and built posts easily so that it wasn't as obscure to modify them.  Maybe there is a way to make this more simple that should happen at some point in the life cycle of the software- I saw Fusion had some sort of GUI for post edits and that makes sense.    I talked to the guy who had solicited me with this deal 9 weeks ago, that we agreed to and supplied our end of.  He claimed he's going to attempt to supply the post by Monday of next week.  I hope that is true.  It had the promise of saving me the attempt to figure out what's wrong with a post and communicating it to support and working to straighten it out, which is stressful and un-enjoyable. 

 

I've heard of the situations where people with the same machines, need different post versions, but I haven't experienced it,  I've had 3 Yama Seiki GLS-2000-LYS machines, and all 3 took code the same.  I have 2 TT1800SY's one is a II and the other pre II marketing and they take the same code.  I have 2 Puma 2100SY II's that take the same code.  I have one Lynx 220LYSC and it takes the same code as the 2100's exception of having a low and high clamp, because they are belt driven C axis machines which drag the spindle against a low clamp in C axis live interpolation.    I have 2 DNM5700 mills, one is an S and one has the S spindle and not the badging and model number.  They take the same code.   So I don't have any of those situations where 2 of the same machine work differently.  It's looking like that's a minority issue, so it should be possible to have a post that is developed for a machine and to sell that post to customers to make their lives easier.  It would be good for the known good posts to be safeguarded and sold, just like it's nice to have cars that are well engineered and don't need recall servicing for issues missed in engineering or manufacturing.  There shouldn't be a good version of the product, and yet the bad version gets sold. 

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And I'm not trying to talk about software or resellers here, I'm just trying to resolve this post development issue since the machine isn't running right now, so it's not an absolute emergency. I think Jparis is missreading this, I'm not here to complain, but to see if anyone has any ability to help on this- like having a contractor post that can building block this issue and help me indirectly by helping the guy working this save time. 

And if this is resolved on Monday, I'll let people know that and maybe I'll be a third party that can share the post I'm looking for with someone in need of their own building block. 

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Every "good" 5-Axis Post costs money. You keep using phrases like "open source", and "help".

Both of the links I provided are to companies who can build exactly the Post you want, with a minimum of fuss involved.

The machine you are describing is not difficult to setup a Post for. I built a VCU 500A-5X Post for someone, using the Generic Fanuc 5X Mill Post as the Base Post Processor. It was not hard to setup for TCPC or WSEC. However, adding TWP(G68.2) to the Post was a total pain. I eventually got that to work as well, but it took the most time to develop. In some cases, the Z-Axis isn't aligned correctly with the tilted plane, so the user has to swap the "P" values on the G53.1 line to make it work.

That said, the MP Post Language does not work like legos. You can cut-and-paste, but 5-Axis has a lot of processing "gotchas" that mean you really have to know how to manipulate the Post output by writing script code, or you have to have a high enough math background that you can write your own Vector and Matrix Math routines. Those are skills that pay someone's bills, not something to be swapped like pokemon cards.

 

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10 hours ago, Colin Gilchrist said:

Every "good" 5-Axis Post costs money. You keep using phrases like "open source", and "help".

Both of the links I provided are to companies who can build exactly the Post you want, with a minimum of fuss involved.

The machine you are describing is not difficult to setup a Post for. I built a VCU 500A-5X Post for someone, using the Generic Fanuc 5X Mill Post as the Base Post Processor. It was not hard to setup for TCPC or WSEC. However, adding TWP(G68.2) to the Post was a total pain. I eventually got that to work as well, but it took the most time to develop. In some cases, the Z-Axis isn't aligned correctly with the tilted plane, so the user has to swap the "P" values on the G53.1 line to make it work.

That said, the MP Post Language does not work like legos. You can cut-and-paste, but 5-Axis has a lot of processing "gotchas" that mean you really have to know how to manipulate the Post output by writing script code, or you have to have a high enough math background that you can write your own Vector and Matrix Math routines. Those are skills that pay someone's bills, not something to be swapped like pokemon cards.

 

But But But But Fusion can do it. Oh yeah let me remember the 40 or so customers that contacted me about problem getting it correct in Fusion. If your a Hobbyist then get Fusion if your a real machine shop they don't offer Fusion they offer Powermill. Fusion is the finish bait for those less experienced enough in real manufacturing and taking it hook line and sinker. If Fusion was the flag ship they would have never bought the 50 or so companies they have bought and taken their IP an integrated into their products.

I was thinking of a Lou Garret or a Babe Ruth Rookie card I would take in trade of the 5 axis post of his dreams. 🤣

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Well like I said, if you had Mazak application people post code to the machine with a Mastercam post that runs, you can't buy that post anyway (or at least can't verify it to be the same), so it's irrelevant.  The reseller might pull a post off the shelf in an undeveloped state, or tell you they can't sell you that version that you have experience with.  If the post is going to require prove out, they shouldn't sell the post, and should just sell the development package instead.   I didn't solicit this deal I'm talking about in the thread, but it was attractive to me because the guy who was offering it, had experience running the machine, so the understanding was that he would be communicating with himself, so I wouldn't be involved in developing the post. 

When a customer has two identical machines that don't operate the same, the right answer is to flip the corresponding parameter or change ladder logic so that they run the same.  It's far easier to work with the machine tool builder or Fanuc to resolve that kind of stuff than to run 2 different posts on 2 identical machines.  In manufacturing if you have 2 or 3 of the same machine, you want to be able to walk one job from one machine to another in the event that the originally proven combo is running another job  one of our 2100SY II's wasn't properly mirrored during install so we shored that up this morning with Ellison.  None of those issues affected cutting motion- one of them was an air-blow parameter flipped causing the spindle synchronization to fail (wringing the part) in part transfer, but both our 2100SY II machines had that issue on delivery and we edited that behavior in both.  

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2 hours ago, 5th Axis CGI said:

I was thinking of a Lou Garret or a Babe Ruth Rookie card I would take in trade of the 5 axis post of his dreams. 🤣

If I get an open source post out of this deal that runs, I'll trade it like a pokemon card just to prove it can be done.  All I'll need is to have it, and for someone to ask for it.  It's not cheap to ask for help for someone I paid to do something because I respect his time and that he's human. 

I wouldn't be here, if I could get the exact post that I know runs because there would be no reason to buy one through a developer who will run it through a test and look at the code. 

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I swear that every 2nd sentence you write, contradicts the one before it. Of course you'd be free to give away work that you paid for. I just find it pretty disingenuous that your asking someone to provide you a an open source post for your machine, and yet have already paid someone to develop one for you. Once that guy you already paid finishes your Post Processor, you should post it here for free, so you can totally screw over the guy who wrote it for you. What a super awesome idea!

Hey Mods,

Can we all agree that this guy is asking for a Post and lock this down? Here is a guy with no contributions to the forum, showing up and vaguely asking for a Post Processor, but covering his "ask" by saying he is ok with giving away someone else's work for free, because he just wants an "open source 5-Axis Post". Oh, but he also isn't interested or willing to do the Post work himself. 

 

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19 hours ago, AGreen5 said:

If I get an open source post out of this deal that runs, I'll trade it like a pokemon card just to prove it can be done.  All I'll need is to have it, and for someone to ask for it.  It's not cheap to ask for help for someone I paid to do something because I respect his time and that he's human. 

I wouldn't be here, if I could get the exact post that I know runs because there would be no reason to buy one through a developer who will run it through a test and look at the code. 

Contact ICAM they offer Open Source Code. The might sell you the company for $15 million and then you can give away their code for free to whomever you choose.  I have 50 parts I need programmed. Once you program them for free and they make perfect parts then we can talk. It is no different!

Problem is because you need something now and got treated wrong by someone else all logic and reason goes out the window. 

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Most 5 axis posts will be locked to a SIM by the developer. The only semi open one, is the generic 5 axis post that is installed in Mastercam, as said earlier this can be edited to output what you need, many have done this.

https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/cad-cam/anyone-have-opensource-mazak-500a-5x-post-mastercam-371488/

 

https://www.cnczone.com/forums/mastercam/393934-mastercam-mazak-posts.html

 

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If you have an account at Mastercam.com you can download the generic Mastercam 5axis post here

https://community.mastercam.com/techexchange

It will require good post guy to get it up to speed for your machine but it can be done.

You are still going to need support down the road and the post will never be 100% post and go.

I strongly suggest you buy one from 

InHouse

https://www.emastercam.com/post-requests/mill-post-request/

or Postability

https://postability.com/

In either case, you will have to purchase it through your dealer.

I would bet good money that Postability could provide you with a 95% dialed in post by the middle of next week.

I've been doing this for nearly 30 years and if I've learned one thing,  you don't cut corners with posts.

Even if you get one up and running for "free", you will spend far more in effort and downtime than buying one from a professional,

and one "oh sh!t" moment can cost you 10 times the price of a post and turn you Class A tack driver into a Class C roughing only dog.

Do yourself a favor, cut your loses, call your dealer and buy a post from people who build them for a living.

 

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