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Mastercam 2019 Bugs


Corey Hampshire
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I have a few bugs when using 2019 that I'm not sure if it is me or the software. First off, I get some crashes in thee middle of tool path regens. I know this could be a million things but was wondering if anyone else gets frequent crashes? I decided to keep track on my white board the number of times it crashes since January 1st. The current total is 10. Not a huge number but it seems to be about once per week. I save often but I do lose some production every now and again.

I am running a Dell Precision T1700 with an Intel i7-4790 at 3.6 GHz. The system has a SSD and 32 Gb of Ram. Video card is a NVIDIA Quadro K2200

Wondering if there is anything that I can do to minimize the frequency of this happening? Can I tweak some settings to give me better stability?

Another Bug I get is when Exporting Tool Paths. When I export Ops, I Export some ops with Geometry and some without. Lets say the first 10 Ops have geometry and the last 30 don't. I export the first 10 with the geometry and they export as expected. Then I un-check the box, and just select the remaining Ops. I export and for some reason it selects the first 10 operations and does those too. I end up with duplicates of the first 10 operations, but with no geometry. This makes it cumbersome when I import the operations to use at a later date.

I was able to replicate this issue on our reseller's computer and stumped them as well. Does anyone know what causes this? How to Fix it? 

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Do you leave your machine on all the time?

Most people do these days, but to an old school guy like me it seems almost criminal, like leaving a

high performance car idling at the curb overnight.

I shut mine off every night and start every morning with a cold boot.

During the day, at the slightest sign of a problem., I save, close MC and reopen.

More serious problems get a reboot.

I also have my RAM usage set to 80% in System Config.

I've also found MC2019 to be the most stable version of Mastercam to date

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21 minutes ago, gcode said:

Do you leave your machine on all the time?

Most people do these days, but to an old school guy like me it seems almost criminal, like leaving a

high performance car idling at the curb overnight.

I shut mine off every night and start every morning with a cold boot.

During the day, at the slightest sign of a problem., I save, close MC and reopen.

More serious problems get a reboot.

I also have my RAM usage set to 80% in System Config.

I've also found MC2019 to be the most stable version of Mastercam to date

I shut my computer off every night. I also reboot when it gets laggy or starts acting weird....The 80% Ram has really helped a lot. Even if I can't make it more stable than what it currently is (I agree with it being the most stable to date) maybe others can help themselves by upping the Ram used. 10 times this year isn't a lot, but I was curious if anyone has found anything else to help with the stability or if it is as good as it is going to get.

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If you are generating lots of large paths: Mastercam has a "tool display" setting, which basically "draws" the lines and arcs of the path, as the path is generating. If you turn this off (select Ops > Right-click > Edit Common Parameters), it can seriously boost the regeneration time.

You can also look in the "system tray" for the Mastercam Event Logger Icon. Whenever I boot up Mastercam, the first thing I do is shut this off. 

If you are generating multiple "multi-threaded" paths at a time, open the "Multi-threading Manager" (View Ribbon), and look at the threads that are generating. You can pause, stop, and resume the threads. If the no threads are actively generating, click on the "settings" button (exclamation point). Here you can set the maximum number of simultaneous threads. Set it to "one thread per core on your processor".

Also, when Threads are generating, you can Right-click on the specific Thread (path), and change the Processor Priority to "High". This can give the Thread priority for calculations during each clock cycle. (Unfortunately, this must always be done manually...)

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45 minutes ago, Colin Gilchrist said:

You can also look in the "system tray" for the Mastercam Event Logger Icon. Whenever I boot up Mastercam, the first thing I do is shut this off. 

 

Thanks for reminding me, you mentioned it to me when you were here and I could not remember what u said afterwards for the life of me... lol your the man, we started transitioning into 2019 after you left and man I am liking it alot. Thanks again for stoping by

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8 hours ago, Colin Gilchrist said:

If you are generating lots of large paths: Mastercam has a "tool display" setting, which basically "draws" the lines and arcs of the path, as the path is generating. If you turn this off (select Ops > Right-click > Edit Common Parameters), it can seriously boost the regeneration time.

You can also look in the "system tray" for the Mastercam Event Logger Icon. Whenever I boot up Mastercam, the first thing I do is shut this off. 

If you are generating multiple "multi-threaded" paths at a time, open the "Multi-threading Manager" (View Ribbon), and look at the threads that are generating. You can pause, stop, and resume the threads. If the no threads are actively generating, click on the "settings" button (exclamation point). Here you can set the maximum number of simultaneous threads. Set it to "one thread per core on your processor".

Also, when Threads are generating, you can Right-click on the specific Thread (path), and change the Processor Priority to "High". This can give the Thread priority for calculations during each clock cycle. (Unfortunately, this must always be done manually...)

Thanks for the input Colin. All these are really great ideas. I have a few questions:

Is there a way to configure Mastercam "Tool Display" to always be off, or is this something I need to do each time I create a tool path? Do I Have to manually close the event logger each time I start Mastercam? Is it faster to set the hyper threading to only do one task at a time?

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15 hours ago, Corey Hampshire said:

Thanks for the input Colin. All these are really great ideas. I have a few questions:

Is there a way to configure Mastercam "Tool Display" to always be off, or is this something I need to do each time I create a tool path? Do I Have to manually close the event logger each time I start Mastercam? Is it faster to set the hyper threading to only do one task at a time?

For the Tool Display, I'm not sure if there is a Global Default or not. I believe there is an option on each different Toolpath dialog box. I'll have to dig into it more. I think you can modify the Operation Defaults File, to modify each Default Operation Type, to default the setting to "off".

The Mastercam Logger must be manually turned off every time you boot Mastercam. I don't think there is an option to disable it.

The Multi-threading is a loaded question. There is a lot to consider in the response.

1st, I believe the default for "# of Threads" is only 2. You can gain processing advantages, if you say "have an 8 core chip", and you set the max number of threads to 8. (Or 4 max, on a 4 core, ect.)

That said, Mastercam makes poor use of Multi-threading in general. Not all paths support Multi-threading. Only the Dynamic and Surface High-Speed paths support Multi-threading. 

But, there is also the "pipe to the threading manager" to consider. What that means is "Mastercam has to package all the data, and ship it off to the Thread Manager, before it can be processed as a Parallel Thread. That takes time, so while the information is being passed to the Manager, that process pauses Mastercam until it is complete.

Also, there are certain paths which are not Multi-threaded at all, which means Mastercam is unresponsive, or idle, while those paths are processing.

I would recommend reading up on the Benchmark 2.0 thread, for some ideas about which current Main Processors are the best. Generally, a higher Clock Speed is more crucial than more cores. Also, have you heard the phrase, "cash is king"? This applies here, except it is "cache is king". The more data we can make available for processing, per given clock cycle, the faster we can process.

Ram is so important, massively important, to running Mastercam these days. 32 Gb is the bare minimum I would recommend for any heavy Toolpath usage, with 64Gb being preferable, and 128 Gb even better.

By the time Mastercam 2020 hits, I would not be surprised to see 256 Gb become the standard for heavy processing.

If you have less than 64 Gb, fix that before you attempt any other upgrades! 32 is just not enough for large files (100+ Mb, with 100-500 Toolpaths, or Toolpaths larger than 10 Mb (Toolpath size is shown in Kb, so you have to convert to get an idea...) Same thing applies when you are dealing with large assemblies (100's or 1000's of solids/surfs).

A Nvidia Quadro (CAD graphics card), with 4Gb or 8Gb video memory is also desirable, but these tend to run $1,000 or more for just the card(s). Dual SLI is not needed for CAD/CAM. It is used for high framerate video processing, specifically for gaming. What it does is uses "2 cards", and tasks each card with rendering alternate frames. So it essentially doubles the framerate by interleaving the video, splitting the workload between two cards. The one exception is if you are getting into high pixel count screens, where each card does essentially half the pixels. (Make sure you match the Resolution of the monitor, with a card that can support that resolution.

"High Definition Video Displays", used to mean "the 1080P standard" (ten-eighty Pee). This stood for the number of horizontal rows in the display. The aspect ratio is 16:9, so for 1080P that is 1920 x 1080 pixels. (1920 horizontal and 1080 vertical). This gives us 2,073,600 total pixels

Now, the latest HD diisplays are either "4K or 8K". They have fundamentally changed the nomenclature because 4K now refers to the appropriate number of horizontal pixels in the display. The resolutions are either 3,840 x 2,160, or 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. The pixel counts are 8,294,400 for 4K, and 33,177,600 pixels for 8K.

As you can see, each standard essentially "squares" the number of pixels on both axes, which results in 4 times the pixel count from the previous standard.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Colin Gilchrist said:

That said, Mastercam makes poor use of Multi-threading in general. Not all paths support Multi-threading. Only the Dynamic and Surface High-Speed paths support Multi-threading. 

Just to add that a number of Multiaxis toolpaths support Multi-threading too, such as Flow and Curve five-axis as well as several more sophisticated paths like Parallel and Morph.

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6 hours ago, Rich Thomas 4D Engineering said:

Just to add that a number of Multiaxis toolpaths support Multi-threading too, such as Flow and Curve five-axis as well as several more sophisticated paths like Parallel and Morph.

Yes, and CNC Software is also rewriting many of the existing paths, to support Multi-threading. This is a good thing in my opinion.

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43 minutes ago, Corey Hampshire said:

Thanks for the info guys. I am stuck at 32 gb of ram as that is all the mother board will allow. Perhaps when I update to 2020 I can talk the boss into a sweet new computer! 😂 I use Area Rest Roughing, Morph, Dynamic and Parallel quite often, so more Ram would be great.

Doing that it would be a must to have 64 gb of RAM. I dd a time study for a company about 6 years ago. They had 5 programmers all using older towers at the time. I came in with my laptop and took one of their files and just regenerated it and showed them the difference. It took about 2 minutes on that file verses the 40 minutes it was taking on their computer. I had them record all the time it was taking them for 30 days on files. We then used that as a ROI for new computers. We showed it was costing the company $250k a year in additional time programming not spending $25k on new systems. They felt I lied to them so they purchased one new system. The one programmer start doing more than the other 4 combined with the new computer. Within a month they all had new systems. Funny go tell someone their heart has a problem and they want to do everything they need to get it checked out and fixed. The programmer for any company is the heart and soul of it and if they don't have professional level and quality tools to do their job then you just reducing the whole company down by not doing everything you can to keep that heart pumping and flowing as best as possible.  

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  • 2 months later...

So very well said! It's sometimes hard to get management to listen but when you start talking to them about saving some serious cash their ears tend to perk up.

On 3/7/2019 at 2:35 PM, 5th Axis CGI said:

Doing that it would be a must to have 64 gb of RAM. I dd a time study for a company about 6 years ago. They had 5 programmers all using older towers at the time. I came in with my laptop and took one of their files and just regenerated it and showed them the difference. It took about 2 minutes on that file verses the 40 minutes it was taking on their computer. I had them record all the time it was taking them for 30 days on files. We then used that as a ROI for new computers. We showed it was costing the company $250k a year in additional time programming not spending $25k on new systems. They felt I lied to them so they purchased one new system. The one programmer start doing more than the other 4 combined with the new computer. Within a month they all had new systems. Funny go tell someone their heart has a problem and they want to do everything they need to get it checked out and fixed. The programmer for any company is the heart and soul of it and if they don't have professional level and quality tools to do their job then you just reducing the whole company down by not doing everything you can to keep that heart pumping and flowing as best as possible.  

 

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