Mastercam Productivity Plus (Probing)

[Roger]

Any one use it?  If so could you give your pros, cons, on the use?  Owners considering having the probe installed on our Haas VF-5 SS.  And getting the MC productivity plus.

[AMCNitro]

The probe alone is worth it to me.  It speeds up setup and changeover considerably.  And if you get the spindle probe and tool prove(might be a package, Im not sure) its even better.  Ive never tried Productivity Plus, so I dont know about that.

[Bob W.]

Any one use it?  If so could you give your pros, cons, on the use?  Owners considering having the probe installed on our Haas VF-5 SS.  And getting the MC productivity plus.

I haven't used it but I would consider a probe a no brainer whether you get Productivity Plus or not.  If you learn how to use it a probe is one of the best investments a shop can make.  It will pay for itself 10 times over.

[Colin Gilchrist]

Prod+ is great software, depending on your need for probing. I've helped setup posts to use it, and trained several others in how to operate it inside Mastercam. One really nice feature of the Prod+ software is the ability to use "labels" and "goto" jumps to probe features on the part, and if the feature is under the tolerance, the logic will adjust the Tool Radius Comp value, and jump back and re-cut the feature.

 

It does support all the other standard probing cycles as well, and allows you to update Work Offsets on the fly. One really nice feature is being able to "see" all the probe moves in Backplot.

 

Sure, you can get much of the same functionality by just modifying your post processor as well, but you won't see the probe cycle moves in Backplot. It really depends on how you intend to use the Probe, and what features you want to support. In the first couple releases, the only real pain was that the points you picked to Probe weren't associative. Meaning if you needed to make edits, it could be a fairly involved and manual process. I think they finally fixed that in X9 or 2016...

 

For the price, it's a great add-on...

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

You can have your program post right out from Mastercam with probing, offset adjustments, and conditional recutting to dial in tolerances and account for tool wear.

[oneyankfan1]

Flawless on 3 and 5 axis, 4 axis you will have issues.

[FROZEN]

why with the 4th??

[Stephan Spears]

Where do I get access to the post processor of the probing functionality?

I need to edit the post.......

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

1 hour ago, Stephan Spears said:

Where do I get access to the post processor of the probing functionality?

I need to edit the post.......

Contact your dealer or Postability.