Post with Advanced Probing Logic

[EX-wccprogrammer]

I have been tasked with developing a post that does some very advanced tweaking of a program. This will require an entire program to be 'best-fit' on a casting, including rotation and floating 'groups' of toolpath to match casting features.

 

My plan of attack is to use comments to 'instruct' the post what calculations to do and what features to probe. The post will 'read' the comment lines and calculate accordingly.

 

If anyone has tried to do anything like this, I would be interested in avoiding some of the problems that were encountered...

[Tim Johnson]

I do a few casting parts with the G68 coordinate rotation (horizontal front plane) and several casting parts with multiple variable offsets for "best fit", but none with both. You have a lot of work. The biggest problem for me was (is) that very few casting processes are similar to others so you have to be careful with messing up previous processes. One thing I did which made life easier for me with multiple offsets was to probe the part at it's nominal zero position, copy all the offsets from the original and as the offsets are probed for each part shift the distance from where the original zero point (X,Y,Z,B. )

[EX-wccprogrammer]

This project requires all adjustments to be made to XY code. On the same work coordinate. In other words, evaluate the casting via the probe, and turn straight cuts into angled cuts if necessary. Plus float groups (using adjusted XY values) without shifting work coordinates.

 

This is going to be fun...

[Tim Johnson]

For the angled cuts just setup the coordinate rotation for all cuts instead of evaluating them. The programmed rotation can be 0° if that if what the probe finds...

 

 

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Probe for angle, rotate using Coordinate Rotation... done. Been doing that since the early 90's. You just need to do two things IIRC, have your initial move be in an always safe location, then expand your search distance to cover max error.

 

JM2C

[huskermcdoogle]

I have a modified mpmaster horizontal post which could do all of this very nicely, will output G68 values and you can insert sub programs (for probing and macro calls) at the end of the posted code as comments and they will post after the M30 so they read in properly without hand editing. Then I call the subprograms with the subprogram drill cycle. I would be willing to help you modify a post for your own needs / provide you with sections of code so you post can do this without any hand editing beyond what you hand write in with manual entry for the probing portion.

 

Good luck.

 

 

Husker