quote: I am sure to be in the minority when I say my absolute preference would be a Linux version. Microsoft is just becoming too domineering. I'd be very surprised to see a Linux version, actually. Folks that use Linux are, for the most part, unwilling to pay for software. That makes it hard for a developer to justify any signifigant investments in Linux.

quote: I started a topic on shifting a 5 axis program, maybe you could comment on it. I was hoping I would get more feedback, but I guess everyone is on the O/T threads instead. I was kinda hoping you got more comments on it, too. I have zero experence with running 5-axis code, and am trying to learn all I can about it. Real problems are frequenly more instructive than the stuff you get from the manuals. Oddly enough.

quote: i am using mc v8.1, i would like to know when i transform mirror a toolpath the option box method and work offset are not allowed. i am trying to run one part g54 and mirror g55. i have been able to use work offsets with the translate and rotate transformations but no luck with mirror. any help would be appreciated. thanks,trevor In the upper right corner of the transform toolpath dialog, on the 'Types and Methods' page, select 'create new operations and geometry' and 'Keep this operation'. That will mirror the geometry and toolpaths, and create them as new independant operations. You can then select the operations and change the work offsets to whatever you want. By selecting 'Keep this operation' you retain the transform operation, which will allow you to re-generate the toolpaths if you need to do that.

quote: Those reccomendation are quite a bit high, not alot of shops will have PC's running that fast unless they've upgraded withing the last 6 months, and if they had gotten that speed of processor, they would have been spending a pretty penny on them.MasterCAM likes big, fast computers alright. But it can also be very happy with smaller, slower, and cheaper ones if that is what you want to run it on. 'Course, one wonders why a shop interested in productivity would spend the kind of money it takes to acquire MasterCAM only to nickle-and-dime the computer to run it on. Kinda like getting a top-of-the-line CNC mill and then limiting yourself to cheap, trashy tooling.

quote: Old schoolers need not worry, they could easily perserve the shortcuts, all you would have to change is leanring to hit the ALT button plus the initial menue item, then your standard shortcut keys. Um, not quite. Using that you'd not be able to (for example) switch from 1-entity trim to 2-entity trim and back by hitting 12. I guess we'll have to wait and see, and hope for smart toolbars.

quote: rchoward please post a Iges file on the FTP that contains a solid for us.Jay, IGES files can support solids. MasterCAM dosn't support those solids, but the IGES files can contian them. I have one here I generated from Inventor if you would like to see it.

I hope that, in the transition to the new interface, MasterCAM retains the keyboard accessability the current menu structure allows. I like being able to type FG to open a file, or CLE to draw an endpoint line. AutoCAD lost some click-saving steps during the transition to a Windows-centric GUI (anyone remember how the pull-down menus worked in R12 DOS?). I would hate to see a useful feature like this go away just to keep from losing marketing points. Now if I'll get a command line and/or floating toolbar sets that re-configure themselvs according to the task I am engaged in (i.e. Inventor or Mechanical Desktop), I take it all back. I'll trade CLE, FG, and even CLEVP for a set of smart floating toolbars. Or a command line. No need to get greedy...

quote: Has anyone seen this error/situation before and can you shed some light on what happened. I've not seen this particular error. With that said, I suspect that the file might have become corrupt at some point, making it difficult for MasterCAM to work with it. MasterCAM will attempt to recover a corrupt drawing when you open it, but that might not sort out all the corrupt toolpath information. Was this file on a floppy disk at any point? FWIW: When I see evedence of corruption in a MasterCAM file (i.e. the Operations Manager shows toolpaths missing tools and/or with 0K NCI files) I delete and re-create the toolpaths. Trying to fix corrupt toolpaths generally does not work, and generates odd-ball errors and/or very strange toolpaths.

quote: Sorry, I'm running MPHaas post, V9. I've snooped around in the post a bit, and looks like I've got it configured to output g54,55,etc. What's frustruating is that it does put out the desired offset when there is no translation taking place..but as soon as I translate, goes back to g54 In the Translate toolpath parameters, select 'Tool Plane' as the translation method (middle left of the 'Type and Method' page), then set the 'Work Offset Numbering' option to 'Maintain source operation's' (bottom right of the same page - will be grayed out if you don't select 'Tool Plane' as the translation method). 'Copy source operaton' with 'Disable posting in selected source operations' is your buddy. It helps keep you from cutting the same thing twice, while making it harder to miss an important step while posting. Very useful ifn you don't want to waste time.

quote: To All- Many who are protesting the war to oust that jerk from Iraq, seem to be saying we are rushing to war. Veterans know better. They do not want war, but they know we have a job that needs to be done. I'm a vetran. US Navy, 1984 to 1994. I left as an Engineman 1st Class. I took part in two ops against Lybia in '86, was teaching at Great Lakes during the Gulf War, was in Somalia in the winter of '94, and was on one of the first ships deployed to Haiti in the summer of '94. I think we are rushing to war, and I don't like it much. This isn't really the most appropriate forum for a political discussion, so I won't go any further into my reasoning. I will say that simply being a vetran does not automaticly mean that I fully support my country's actions. Nor does it necessaraly mean that my views on this subject carry any more weight than anyone else's.

I have some questions about fixes in V9.1 for those of you using V9.1. WCS related: 1) I have noticed that Job Setup's stock definition seems to change depending on what WCS is active. This makes verify somewhat difficult to use, as the defined stock jumps around. Is this fixed in 9.1? 2) Creating construction planes with a WCS active is difficult. Try this: - Create a solid box - Make a WCS on the front face of the box using Entity|Solid Face from the select menu and move the origin point to one of the corners of that box. - Make the new WCS active. - Click on the Cplane button in the secondary menu and use the Entity|Solid Face option to create a cplane on the top face of the box. What I expect is a new cplane on the top face of the box. What I get is a new cplane with a displaced origin on the front of the box. I see other even less rational displacements when I use imported CAD files that are not located at the origin. 3) When I change WCSs, I almost always have to re-set my cplane and toolplane as they move into bizare places seemingly unrelated to thier original locations. 4) I leave the origin lines on most of the time, as they help me retain my orentation in space. I'd like to see the brown system origin lines follow the WCS, and have the cyan and green origin lines show up only when I displace the cplane/tplane from the WCS origin. Toolpaths: 1) If I use 'Change Common Parameters' to change program numbers or coolant settings for an entire operation group, I find that I need to regen most of the toolpaths (not, surprisingly enough, all). Changing these parameters should not require a regen of the paths in V9. 2) Importing operations from another file (i.e. to attach them to a new version of a solid model) when the imported groups contain more than one op using a defined workplane generates an error about multipule definitions for workplane ##, which means I have to go to each operaton and re-define the WCS it is using. Translation: 1) Imporitng (or attmpting to import) Inventor R6 files crashes MasterCAM. Using MasterCAM Direct from Inventor R6 crashes MasterCAM, too. Using MasterCAM Direct from Invnetor R5.x on a system with Inventor R6 installed *also* crashes MasterCAM. As I do my solid modeling in Invnetor R6, this is somewhat annoying. The WCS issues are particularly vexing, as they make it hard for me to show my students how to use them. Some of them manage to work around it, but it trips a lot of the rest of them up.

quote: I am wondering who is using MC for wood and what machine they are posting to. I have several clients who use MasterCAM with various Technos for working with wood. It seems to be a good combination.

Aside from the real basic stuff like setting and/or changing switches I don't cover it. I don't have time for much more than that.

quote: on some machines the null modem adapter needs to be on the CNC end of the cable. How would that make a difference?

The computers in my lab at school all have Quadra4 750 boards, and I have a Quadra DCC on my office workstation. They are wonderful with anything I throw at them. I prefer NVidia for all the reasons I used to like 3D Labs for. Nvidia's unified driver archetecture means that even the low-end boards can make use of stable ISV certified workstation-class drivers. The Quadra4 750 seems the best bang-for-buck of the three, as it's viewperf scores are signifigantly better than the 550 and it has twice the video ram. The 900 only offers a marginal boost over the 750. Given that it is twice the price, that boost dosn't seem worth the premium.

There does seem to be a method to the madness of stock location with multipule WCSs. What I do is set the WCS to match the WCS I used when originally doing Job set-up. This is usually the WCS of the first set of operations. Then run verify. If verify procededs to slam into your stock and chop it into little bits, cancel verify, click on WCS on the secondary menu, change the WCS to anything else, then - before closing the WCS dialog - change it back to the job setup WCS. Then run verify again. I don't know *why* this works, which is annoying, but it does seem to work. Anyone know if this is fixed in 9.1?

Could you post a sample that illistrates the problem? I tried it on my system with a couple dozen randomly geneerated points and point sorting seemed to work fine.

quote: I am a fairly new user to MasterCam 8.1 also a student and cannot figure out how to tie the layers, colors, and linetypes together like AutoCAD does. You cannot tie the levels and colors together like AutoCAD does. This is because what you use levels and colors for in MasterCAM is very much unlike what you use layers for in AutoCAD. You can sorta simulate the tying together by using groups, but groups can only be generated from existing entities, not set as an object creation mode. Before you go there, it is important to know why things are arranged the way they are, and how that tying can help in AutoCAD, but can make for more work in MasterCAM. In AutoCAD, you use layers primarally to orginize your drawing for plotting. In plotted drawings, there are many subtile differences between the various lines and arcs in the print and any variation in them can cause a great deal of confusion further down the line. Rather than have dozens of differnet continuous lines, dozens of differnet 1x dashed lines, and so on, AutoCAD has a single line command that - depending on your layer settings - can produce any of the dozens of differnt lines that enable a print to communicate as efficently as a photograph, with the depth of an encylopedia. Drawings and drawing sets can be enormosuly complex. They can represent the collective work of dozens or even hundreds of people, and are frequently used to direct the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of workers, all of whom need to be able to understand them completely with as little study as possible. Becaue of the meaning associated with variaitons in line weight, color, and style, it is important to ensure that all these elements are in sync whenever you draw anything. In MasterCAM, we are generally working on a drawing consisting of a single part and its associated fixtures and workholding arrangement, so our drawings will never get as complex as an AutoCAD drawing set can. Our parts have to fit into assemblys with other parts, but the nature and scope of those assemblys is not dealt with in our toolpaths. Plotted output is not the primary goal of a CAM system. Our goal is to produce accurate parts as efficently as possible. Period. Levels and colors, rather than being used as an aid in maintaining and enforcing the differnence between object lines and datum lines, are used to orginize our drawing for the toolpaths we use to achive our goal of accurate parts in minimum cycle time. How (and if) everything fits together has to be dealt with before we start generating code, and MasterCAM is not the tool for doing that. In the course of generating the geometry needed for a toolpath, it is often desireable to have different colors used for the geometry on a particular layer, or the same color used for geometry on different layers. If MasterCAM had a way to force color and linestyle to folow the level, you'd often find yourself turning that feature off to get your toolpaths written. As an example, I generally maintain one or more levels for add-on geometry I use to generate a specific kind of tool move, so I can turn that stuff off when I need to work on the model itself. But to help me select the wires and my add-on geometry in a complex model, I'll want the color to be the same so I can mask my selection by color. If I need to further subdivide the geometry seletion, I might use different linestyles in different parts of the chain. For surface models, I might have some surfaces that will be used as checks in some toolpaths, and as drive surfaces in other paths. If there are a lot of surfaces to deal with, I'll need a way to classify them when selecting that is unmistakeable, depending on what I am trying to do in a particular toolpath. Seperate levels, colors, linestyles, and lineweights make it easy for me to generate selection filters that enable me to generate good toolpaths. And good toolpaths are the bottom line here. Not good plots. quote: If I do this also can I use it as a setup file to start with so I don't have to do that every time? Sort of. You can generate different .MC9 files with your different drawing settings, save them into the MC9 folder, and mark them read-only. That way you can't accidentally overwrite them, forcing you to save to a different file name after opening them.

I'll do that. I'm not entirely certan that we will be able to get the whole thing done in one semester. If we get either the pump or the turbine end completed, I'll be thrilled.

quote: Well Rick is back and full bore. You beat me to the bunch. How are you doing Rick? Got a little between-semester downtime, lots of time off from work for the hollidays, and looking forward to making lots of chips over the next couple of months. I got a small turbine-and-pump project I'm gonna work on this next semester with my students.

quote: I just tried to open a .mc7 file and it said "incompatible version numbers,run file converter". I have mc9,what converter is it referring to? The file is either damaged or it is incorrectly named. If it is on a floppy disk, I'd bet its damaged.

quote: Up until recently I would preview a hardcopy, then use the "print screen" key on the keyboard to paste the bitmap image to the sheet in Excel. But resizing the image would often result in pixelation or a crappy image. The shop recently purchased Autocad LT wich enables me to make the sketch and copy it directly into Excel. I would like to keep consistency and use Mastercam to make these drawings though, if it's at all possible. Two possibilities suggust themselvs to me. Possiblity 1: - Convert the .MC9 to a .DWG and attach that to the spreadsheet. This is the simplest way. Possibility 2: - Install a postscript printer in Windows that is configured to print to file. Apple PS printers generally expect .EPS files to be sent to them, so they are a good bet. In XP Pro I had good results with the Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS. - Screen-Next Menu-Plot, set WinDriver to 'Y' and select the print-to-file printer from above. - Specify a file name with an .EPS extention. - Insert the resulting file into Excel. Possibility #1 is simple, but dosn't necessarly offer the kind of control you might want, and it cannot output toolpath images without a lot more work. Possibility #2 is a little more work, but offers a much finer level of control and can also (if you use the graphical setup sheets) output toolpath images. You could also try using something like Corel Draw to read in HPGL plot files generated by MasterCAM, then insert those images into Excel. That, frankly, seems like way too much work.

quote: I can even keep the *.cfgs on our server so I can use my config from any of our machines by using Target: C:Mcam9Mill9.exe ServerDirDirpaul-lathe9.cfg Some other options that won't require seperate icons for each user: target: c:mcam9mill9.exe z:mill9.cfg where the z: drive is the users home directory on the server and mapped at log-in. Each user will, if they don't already have one, have a mill9.cfg file generated using the defaults the first time they log on. target: c:mcam9mill9.exe %HOME%mill9.cfg if you are on Windows 2000/XP Pro and have home directories defined. target: c:mcam9mill9.exe serverdir%USERNAME%.cfg if you are on Windows NT/2000/XP Pro and want all the .CFG files in the same place. This way you only need to change the icons once, and can change them in 'All Users' start menu rather than futzing with them in the individual profile directories.

quote: DOH!!!! Forgot the obvious. Hate when that happens. Rick this should do what you are asking. It does. It seems that the A0. is getting added as part of a reference return, which seems to be being added weither I turn reference returns on or not. I'm thinking that if I fix that bit, and add some logic to that part of the code, I can leave rot_on_x set to 1, allowing me to output 3 or 4 axis code with the same post. This would be best for me, as I am not always smart enough to select the proper post before I start generaitng toolpaths. Thanks all for all the input. I gots lots of stuff to try now.

quote: Mpfan handles subs as O0001 and O1001 for the two sub levels used in Mastercam, and they increment up from there. Mpmaster adds the program number in, specifically so that O0001 and O1001 etc. are not overwritten with the very next program using subs. With a program number of O1234, the sub numbering would be O1235 and O2235. You do have control over this behaviour - search for sav_progno in the post. I kinda created the problem for myself by numbering my programs sequentially (3557, 3558, and 3559), then changing the number of sub programs in one of the operations in 3557 (I added depth cuts to a multi-pass contour) and re-posting it without re-posting the other programs. The best 'fix' seems to be changing the post so it can output all the programs at once, sorta as you outline below. quote: Can't really comment on your feed issues without the file. Test out Mpfan and see if it handles the feeds differently. Will do. quote: e.g. if progno <> prv_progno, pnewprog I used an if/else construct in the tool change functions and compared progno to zero, which seemed to work. I only put program numbers on the first op of a given group, leaving all the rest set to 0.