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Examples of using Excel within your Manufacturing experiences


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3 hours ago, Metallic said:

Let me know if these achieve the same thing

Short Answer:  No

Long Answer:

What I had done was more to compensate for lack of high quality surface models.  At the time I did some modeling of the features I was cutting to create more accurate surfaces to drive with that would have better continuity overall, but by no means perfect, as the shapes were out of my league to model perfectly with the time I had.  Those efforts helped immensely, but as I was using a tool that was larger than the minimum curvature (very very very very small ripples in places) this fault caused me to have some "extra" points here and there.  You know, those pesky zigs and zags, or that extra point between two points that you don't understand why the toolpath generated it, and lack of a filter won't allow us to remove it?  Those were what I was removing.  I must stress that I didn't correct any point to point data.  I was just evaluating the motion of the toolpath and deleting any points that exceeded a certain vector difference over a moving average based on a number of points in front and behind of where we were.  I had played around with filtering posture changes as well, but given that I was using a guide curve with the tool path, it wasn't really needed on that job, filtering the translational points in space was more than enough to make a better program.  I wish I had before and after pictures of the parts.  The before part looked like it had pock marks from ball bearings being dropped all over it, and the after looked nice and smooth without so much as a divot.  Mind you this was cutting wood on a large gantry router.  I'd say we might have been successful at moving around 120IPM at the fastest with the original program and the filtered program was moving constantly around 300.  I had other jobs where the combination of translational and rotational filtering would have helped, but never had time to refine the algorithm to the point where I was going to cut parts with it.  Not to mention it was a pain in the butt to get the import NCI function activated in MC after 2017, so I didn't bother.  I think that function is back on by default now.  AFIAK it never totally disappeared before, but was just left out of the GUI for us to use.

As for the functions you highlighted in the pictures above.  Yes, combinations of those settings will have a huge effect on the quality/capability of the program to generate a good surface finish, and/or move at decent feedrates.  But the most important thing for getting good results is good input geometry.  Constant curvature continuity of the base drive surfaces will yield the best results by far if you need to drive posture using the drive surface.  Otherwise, if using surfaces without constant curvature continuity, using points or lines from whatever logical distance from or through the surface will yield the smoothest posture control.  Smoothing of added tilt collision controls, such as shown above are there to smooth from the normal tilt strategy into the added, and back again.  I haven't played with the smoothing feature on the unified toolpath yet, but will at some point to see how and what it does.  Maybe there is some hope. 

Some sort of filter function on the Moduleworks paths would be great......

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5 minutes ago, huskermcdoogle said:

Short Answer:  No

Long Answer:

What I had done was more to compensate for lack of high quality surface models.  At the time I did some modeling of the features I was cutting to create more accurate surfaces to drive with that would have better continuity overall, but by no means perfect, as the shapes were out of my league to model perfectly with the time I had.  Those efforts helped immensely, but as I was using a tool that was larger than the minimum curvature (very very very very small ripples in places) this fault caused me to have some "extra" points here and there.  You know, those pesky zigs and zags, or that extra point between two points that you don't understand why the toolpath generated it, and lack of a filter won't allow us to remove it?  Those were what I was removing.  I must stress that I didn't correct any point to point data.  I was just evaluating the motion of the toolpath and deleting any points that exceeded a certain vector difference over a moving average based on a number of points in front and behind of where we were.  I had played around with filtering posture changes as well, but given that I was using a guide curve with the tool path, it wasn't really needed on that job, filtering the translational points in space was more than enough to make a better program.  I wish I had before and after pictures of the parts.  The before part looked like it had pock marks from ball bearings being dropped all over it, and the after looked nice and smooth without so much as a divot.  Mind you this was cutting wood on a large gantry router.  I'd say we might have been successful at moving around 120IPM at the fastest with the original program and the filtered program was moving constantly around 300.  I had other jobs where the combination of translational and rotational filtering would have helped, but never had time to refine the algorithm to the point where I was going to cut parts with it.  Not to mention it was a pain in the butt to get the import NCI function activated in MC after 2017, so I didn't bother.  I think that function is back on by default now.  AFIAK it never totally disappeared before, but was just left out of the GUI for us to use.

As for the functions you highlighted in the pictures above.  Yes, combinations of those settings will have a huge effect on the quality/capability of the program to generate a good surface finish, and/or move at decent feedrates.  But the most important thing for getting good results is good input geometry.  Constant curvature continuity of the base drive surfaces will yield the best results by far if you need to drive posture using the drive surface.  Otherwise, if using surfaces without constant curvature continuity, using points or lines from whatever logical distance from or through the surface will yield the smoothest posture control.  Smoothing of added tilt collision controls, such as shown above are there to smooth from the normal tilt strategy into the added, and back again.  I haven't played with the smoothing feature on the unified toolpath yet, but will at some point to see how and what it does.  Maybe there is some hope. 

Some sort of filter function on the Moduleworks paths would be great......

That is a great explanation thank you. I agree, your output is only as good as your input.

 

Last year I was trying to do a complex toolpath using Geodesic with several stitched surfaces. No matter what I did the output sucked majorly. Surfaces were bad.

 

Back on topic, if anyone has a QUICK way to grab CSV tooling data from either standalone Tool Manager or Mastercam 2022 I would be eternally grateful. The export tool data switch that used to live in Advanced Config apparently doesnt exist there anymore. I'm sorry if i sound dumb but I really don't know scripting (want to learn) and don't understand exactly what that example above was describing exactly

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On 9/8/2021 at 5:15 PM, Metallic said:

…Back on topic, if anyone has a QUICK way to grab CSV tooling data from either standalone Tool Manager or Mastercam 2022 I would be eternally grateful. The export tool data switch that used to live in Advanced Config apparently doesnt exist there anymore. I'm sorry if i sound dumb but I really don't know scripting (want to learn) and don't understand exactly what that example above was describing exactly

Can you use json or xml, or do you need a csv?

For fun, I took a quick look at exporting a csv this weekend (importing from a csv doesn’t seem  practical), and this proof of concept is what I came up with.

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5 hours ago, Zaffin_D said:

Can you use json or xml, or do you need a csv?

For fun, I took a quick look at exporting a csv this weekend (importing from a csv doesn’t seem  practical), and this proof of concept is what I came up with.

Nice work, I was originally thinking

it would be a lot easier to load the data using Microsoft Interop Excel from a spreadsheet,

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2 hours ago, Thee Kid™ said:

Nice work, I was originally thinking

it would be a lot easier to load the data using Microsoft Interop Excel from a spreadsheet,

So could you have a master excel spread sheet as thee tool library?

Then import that into the mastercam tool manager?

And then as you amend your excel master library, you upload/append into your mastercam tool library?

That would be sweet, because with the excel master, you can also add part number and issue columns so you can list the part numbers that your tools are used on etc etc....

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9 hours ago, Zaffin_D said:

Can you use json or xml, or do you need a csv?

For fun, I took a quick look at exporting a csv this weekend (importing from a csv doesn’t seem  practical), and this proof of concept is what I came up with.

It does not explicitly need to be CSV, I fundamentally only want a few basic datapoints that I can EASILY use in a text format to build out an Excel or Google Sheets tooling list without having to define each tool manually within the spreadsheet. I've already got a massive tool library I have made within Mastercam, I just want to extract the text data.

Examples of those factors = tool number, name, diameter, LOC, reach, description, MFG, speeds/feeds, etc...

 

Your solution looks perfect! Care to share the add-in?

9 hours ago, Zaffin_D said:

Can you use json or xml, or do you need a csv?

For fun, I took a quick look at exporting a csv this weekend (importing from a csv doesn’t seem  practical), and this proof of concept is what I came up with.

I am definitely not concerned with importing a CSV into mastercam...I don't see a value-add there and sounds like it would be messy! I build the tools in ToolManager but that data is only captured in Tool Manager and I want to manage that data effectively outside of Mastercam in shop planning and management.

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16 hours ago, Metallic said:

It does not explicitly need to be CSV, I fundamentally only want a few basic datapoints that I can EASILY use in a text format to build out an Excel or Google Sheets tooling list without having to define each tool manually within the spreadsheet. I've already got a massive tool library I have made within Mastercam, I just want to extract the text data.

Examples of those factors = tool number, name, diameter, LOC, reach, description, MFG, speeds/feeds, etc...

 

Your solution looks perfect! Care to share the add-in?

I am definitely not concerned with importing a CSV into mastercam...I don't see a value-add there and sounds like it would be messy! I build the tools in ToolManager but that data is only captured in Tool Manager and I want to manage that data effectively outside of Mastercam in shop planning and management.

The .tooldb File is a SQLite Database or something similar. I opened in in DB Browser for SQLite and could read some data. I don't know much about SQL, so an expert in that area could maybe help you.

Screenshot 2021-09-14 094915.jpg

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If you guys wanted to create a topic about the tool import export from excel/csv request on the mastercam forum that might help it get some traction., I don't know that the tools team monitor this forum.

That is not a trivial request, the tool creation process is quite complicated in Mastercam, especially for certain tool types!

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