Macros

[cncchipmaker]

I just wanted to thank everyone for all of the great ideas you have given me for custom macro B applications over the past year. I am still in need of more creative ideas. The boredom at work is killing me and I need something solid to ponder and work on. Thanks again for all of your help.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

Sounds like it may be time to look for more challenging work.  Or you could do it the eMastercam way and argue politics and religion in Off Topic.

[Colin Gilchrist]

Besides writing Macros by hand, what kind of integration have you done with Mastercam for outputting Macros? Are you using Custom Drill Cycles -> these are great for using Macro functionality. Are your posts outputting variable values for Feed, Plunge, and Retract? What about Tool Diameter and Length offsets? I have my post output #3020 for these values (H#3020 D#3020) so that the machine reads the H/D numbers from what ever tool is currently loaded in the spindle.

[cncchipmaker]

Sounds like it may be time to look for more challenging work.  Or you could do it the eMastercam way and argue politics and religion in Off Topic.

I am slated to start running CMMs in a couple of months. Should be a good change to what I am doing now and there should be plenty of opportunity for programming there too.

[Alex2009]

I just wanted to thank everyone for all of the great ideas you have given me for custom macro B applications over the past year. I am still in need of more creative ideas. The boredom at work is killing me and I need something solid to ponder and work on. Thanks again for all of your help.

You can try to make a 3D tool compensation for your machine

 

 

 

Test of 3D-compensation for MAZAK Integrex e1060. The main idea - I have one NC-program for 5-axis milling and I can use this nc-programm for ball-nose tool 20 mm diameter and 10 mm radius and the same programm for ball-nose tool 16 mm and R8 mm. More, I can use real 3D-compesation for each tool, for example +0.4 mm or -0.8 mm.

[Charlie Pierson]

I've got a system of macros in our HMCs and VMC's which enables us to write a program for one part only and the

system macros will take care of the rest of the parts on the fixture automatically.

 

All the operator has to do is change one variable to go from single-shot mode to complete pallet mode using the exact same code.

Really easy to maintain the programs or alter them if needs be.

 

On our verticals we can choose our start part and our finish part so say on a pallet of 20 parts we can make parts 1-20, 3-9, 2-18

10-17, etc or just 1 part.

 

We do what Colin mentions and also list our hole locations (for canned cycles) in only 1 subprogram / feature face.

We use a couple of local variables to jump to or skip over hole locations.

The hole locations are programmed only once thus making it very easy to maintain or change.

 

This all makes for pretty compact programs.

 

The system macros are applied across the board so , to our operators, a Yasnak, Fanuc, Mazak, Haas, Vertical of Horizontal,

look pretty much the same.

[Tim Johnson]

Most of my systems are somewhat similar to Charlie's. I've just written three systems that will probe and store up to twelve separate variable offsets per part.

 

All my systems (31) are posted out and require no manual intervention.