Mass edit ability in Advanced Drill

[crazy^millman]

Hello Mastercam community I have a part where I am using a Flywheel style backspot facing tool and we tried it in one shot and the tool loaded up as I suspected it would. I know need to peck the back spot face tool. I am covering 35mm of distance and want to peck it every 2mm. I have added tons of places to make the peck happen in advanced drill. Problem is there is no mass edit and when you copy operations after 2 copies of one of the segments everything starts to get lost in the fields. You have to then go one by one to edit the fields with RPM, Feed Rate and Spindle Direction.

#1 I am requesting that we be given and mass edit ability to grab 10 or 100 segments and apply these across them quickly verses having to do them one at a time.

#2 This is setup like a spread sheet I also ask that key board arrows work like they do in a spread sheet. Click the down arrow in one of the columns then go down that column and keep that column active to scroll through and change that column if that is how a programmer wants to edits that column.



#3 I would also like to request spread sheet math logic to this area also. I want to peck 2mm and then retract 1mm then peck 2mm higher than the last peck. I want to rinse and repeat this form -70mm to -35.17mm. That will require over I go into excel and create the math logic and get my number really quick so I have something to help me track what I am trying to have. That is 36 lines I need added. If we could do logic like this then I could just copy paste the logic from one row to the next like Excel and be done. For this task I have to change 4 fields in the row. That is over 144 mouse click even if I do each of them in less than 5 seconds which is humping that is 12 minutes of programming time that could be avoided if we had these feature. I have 3 operations like this so it will take no less than 30 minutes if I am lucky to accomplish this work. I could spend 30 minutes do so many other thing if this was faster and easier to use. Oh well customer wonders why it cost so much I just let them know it is the limitations of the software I am using.

[Zoffen]

#4 Import from excel option?

[Chally72]

I posted this on the official forum as well, but- great suggestions, and they're logged as follows:

R-29984- Add ability to edit multiple segments at once
R-29985- Add spreadsheet style navigation to segment grid
R-29986- Add math calculations to segment grid

[huskermcdoogle]

I applaud you Ron for using this tool (advanced drill) and coming up with feedback to alleviate frustrations in applying it to the real world.  God knows barely any of us have time to take the time to do that.  I haven't had the pleasure of using the Advance Drill toolpath yet in a real world application, so I am of no practical use to the situation, just theoretical ;).

Sticking to the theme of improving function of the advanced drill function. Seems to me it would be well suited to create some sort of segment pattern repeat function so you can further customize pecking cycles without a lot of work.  In my mind anyway, it seems you could use this function to create compound pecking routines, that would say peck, peck, clear, peck, peck, clear.  So on so forth.  Giving you the ability to loop certain sections, but able to vary only certain fields based on depth.

I'll quit dreaming.  Back to the real world.

Just an outside view here....  I'm assuming you are dealing with a stubborn customer that won't think outside the box here?  I say that because this is a case where a simple Macro and custom cycle definition in the post would probably be 10x faster to get a nice flexible result.  Course then verify wouldn't function for this tool, and of course it would require some light post editing which the customer probably won't do...  

Thanks for all you do for this community!

[crazy^millman]

2 hours ago, huskermcdoogle said:

I applaud you Ron for using this tool (advanced drill) and coming up with feedback to alleviate frustrations in applying it to the real world.  God knows barely any of us have time to take the time to do that.  I haven't had the pleasure of using the Advance Drill toolpath yet in a real world application, so I am of no practical use to the situation, just theoretical ;).

Sticking to the theme of improving function of the advanced drill function. Seems to me it would be well suited to create some sort of segment pattern repeat function so you can further customize pecking cycles without a lot of work.  In my mind anyway, it seems you could use this function to create compound pecking routines, that would say peck, peck, clear, peck, peck, clear.  So on so forth.  Giving you the ability to loop certain sections, but able to vary only certain fields based on depth.

I'll quit dreaming.  Back to the real world.

Just an outside view here....  I'm assuming you are dealing with a stubborn customer that won't think outside the box here?  I say that because this is a case where a simple Macro and custom cycle definition in the post would probably be 10x faster to get a nice flexible result.  Course then verify wouldn't function for this tool, and of course it would require some light post editing which the customer probably won't do...  

Thanks for all you do for this community!

Just trying to give back and help everyone with the suggestions and appreciate you letting me know. 

Using MT and using anything else through it would be a nightmare. Customer is pretty much letting me write the book on everything we are doing. It is a onshoring project bringimg work to the USA that was being done in Japan. They are making a nice looking part, but our work is setting the new standard for them. Machine issues and Rev changes have dragged this one out longer than any of us would like. On the 10th revision of the MT environment. One the 3 revision of the machine software. On the 6th revision of the part. Running into something like this is just one of the areas where at least I hope my input helps and makes the product better which makes all of our lives better using Mastercam to earn a living. 

[huskermcdoogle]

2 hours ago, crazy^millman said:

On the 10th revision of the MT environment.

Sounds like you are going down the right path....  I know I definately wouldn't be asking for custom functionality in that case.  Maybe it would just be easier to do it via manual entry...

Best of luck and good work as usual.

 

[SlaveCam]

Advanced Drill is simply put godsent. It has saved me of frustration many times (rendering some of the drilling cycles obsolete). Advanced drill is something that's pretty basic in Mazatrol and I'm glad it's now in Mastercam.

However the UI is a bit clunky (anyone surprised)? What constantly annoys me is that when over a cell, you can't select a numeric value by double-clicking it in order to overwrite it quickly. You can't also select depths relative to top of stock. If there two things were fixed, it would be near perfect.

[bd41612]

On 2/2/2022 at 8:02 AM, Chally72 said:

I posted this on the official forum as well, but- great suggestions, and they're logged as follows:

R-29984- Add ability to edit multiple segments at once
R-29985- Add spreadsheet style navigation to segment grid
R-29986- Add math calculations to segment grid

 

 

On 2/1/2022 at 12:51 PM, crazy^millman said:

Hello Mastercam community I have a part where I am using a Flywheel style backspot facing tool and we tried it in one shot and the tool loaded up as I suspected it would. I know need to peck the back spot face tool. I am covering 35mm of distance and want to peck it every 2mm. I have added tons of places to make the peck happen in advanced drill. Problem is there is no mass edit and when you copy operations after 2 copies of one of the segments everything starts to get lost in the fields. You have to then go one by one to edit the fields with RPM, Feed Rate and Spindle Direction.

#1 I am requesting that we be given and mass edit ability to grab 10 or 100 segments and apply these across them quickly verses having to do them one at a time.

#2 This is setup like a spread sheet I also ask that key board arrows work like they do in a spread sheet. Click the down arrow in one of the columns then go down that column and keep that column active to scroll through and change that column if that is how a programmer wants to edits that column.



#3 I would also like to request spread sheet math logic to this area also. I want to peck 2mm and then retract 1mm then peck 2mm higher than the last peck. I want to rinse and repeat this form -70mm to -35.17mm. That will require over I go into excel and create the math logic and get my number really quick so I have something to help me track what I am trying to have. That is 36 lines I need added. If we could do logic like this then I could just copy paste the logic from one row to the next like Excel and be done. For this task I have to change 4 fields in the row. That is over 144 mouse click even if I do each of them in less than 5 seconds which is humping that is 12 minutes of programming time that could be avoided if we had these feature. I have 3 operations like this so it will take no less than 30 minutes if I am lucky to accomplish this work. I could spend 30 minutes do so many other thing if this was faster and easier to use. Oh well customer wonders why it cost so much I just let them know it is the limitations of the software I am using.

Dylan, I think what would benefit Ron here and anyone else who might be back spotfacing is if we could enter a negative value for segment peck, so that the pecks would go in the opposite direction.

[Chally72]

5 hours ago, bd41612 said:

 

Dylan, I think what would benefit Ron here and anyone else who might be back spotfacing is if we could enter a negative value for segment peck, so that the pecks would go in the opposite direction.

Back spotting/Back chamfering centrifugal/hydraulic tools are something we are looking at supporting in a much more natural way in the future.