I have an operation that is dependent on other operations (like a Mastercam Restmill operation, for example). I'd like to get notified when one of those operations becomes dirty, so that I can automatically mark my own operation as dirty. I thought there might be a way to do this via the m_notify C-Hook function, but I don't see a notification event that would trigger it. Anyone have any idea on how to do this?

babolino, I don't know what you mean about "sharp corner moves". The only sharp corners in the toolpath picture you showed above are when the tool is out of material and repositioning itself. Any actual feed moves should be tangent continuous.

Sorry, I haven't responded to the forum yet; I've been working with MultiAxGod directly on this issue. Two separate things: 1) When you install, the client needs to go in the CHOOKS subdirectory of wherever your Mastercam installation is. Otherwise it won't show up. I've added some language to the installer to make this a bit more explicit. 2) The system corruption was an odd thing that no one had experienced before. The client uses the OpenSSL encryption library to make sure that communication over the internet is secure. Apparently there was already another application on MultiAxGod's system that used the same dll, but an older version, and both applications wanted to put it in the same place. I'm still working with MultiAxGod to make sure we get the right version of his dll back where it was. However, for anyone else, since only a few functions are used, I've resolved the issue by building them into the VoluMill dll directly and not installing the OpenSSL dll (and thus avoiding a dll conflict). The new version of the installer is now up on the site. Anyone who downloads the new version of the installer should not experience the problem. If you have already downloaded it and had no problems, then it's not an issue for you, although of course you can always install the newer version and it will upgrade. Thanks, and please continue to let us know if you experience any problems.

Racerx, Sorry you're having that problem. Apparently after the uninstall it's still trying to put the icon on your toolbar. If you go to Settings->Customize you may see a toolbar called "New Toolbar". Right-click on it to delete it, and you shouldn't see the error next time you start up.

Hey everyone, We're just about to launch the 2-axis Complete version of our VoluMill toolpath service, and we're looking for experienced users such as yourselves to try it out. The 2-axis Complete version adds open shape and remachining options to our existing 2-axis Pockets version. For those of you who aren't familiar with VoluMill, it's designed to drastically cut cycle time and extend cutting tool life. It differs from other approaches such as trochoidal, peel milling, and adaptive clearing in that it does not have that much more tool motion than a standard constant offset toolpath but you can run it at much higher feeds and speeds because it removes sharp corners and manages axial and radial depth of cut and feedrates to keep a constant material removal rate. There's more information at http://www.volumill.com or in the February issue of Modern Machine Shop (online version here) if you're interested. We have downloadable add-ins for Mastercam X and X2, and it is sold as a service (kind of like maintenance, only with no up-front cost to buy a license) and delivered from our fast servers over the internet. The toolpath is encrypted and compressed for transfer, so it's secure and fast (I sometimes demo the service from my laptop connecting via Bluetooth to my cellphone to show the speed). Anyway, if you are interested in being a beta tester, please send us an email to [email protected] with the following information: 1) Name 2) Email address 3) Company name (if applicable) 4) What materials you typically cut 5) What machine you typically cut with 6) Anything else you want to tell us If you want to try the pocketing version but are not interested in being a beta site, you can do that right now just by going to http://www.volumill.com and entering your email address on the Products page to get a free trial. No credit card necessary, just an email address and a name. We also have an interactive web browser-based demo that you can run on some predefined parts to see what the toolpath looks like without signing up. We're always eager to hear from you; we've already gotten some great feedback and advice from this site.

Some additional responses to Crazy Millman's points: 1) I can't go into detail here, but there are options for customers of a certain size who have security concerns which would allow them to control their data as they see fit. However, some customers who would not want to send out their full designs might have no problem sending out simple individual 2-D pocket geometry that gives no indication of the full part they are actually making. We have talked to a few facilities with high levels of security who have had no problem with this, and they are happy with our heavy encryption and guarantees that their data will never be saved by us. 2) In practice, going out of business is a risk you run with any software you purchase, and it's a risk your software providers run with providers of technology they license. Not only do you lose support, training, upgrades, etc. for the product, at some point you will lose the ability to do data exchange with other products, and possibly it will not work at all when you have to do an OS upgrade. With a service business, one of two things usually happens: either it is generating no revenue, in which case it stops, or it is generating some possibly small amount of revenue, and some other company purchases the right to keep it running; because it is generating revenue, there is a value to it. If the technology has enough value to customers that they need to use it to generate toolpaths, the service will exist in some form. If it does not have enough value, the customers will stop paying for it and choose other solutions. Ultimately, I suspect it would be far worse to buy an expensive CAM system from a company that goes out of business six months later.

Thanks again for the feedback. We really are listening, and appreciate what you are all saying. A few specific comments: First, to Mic, an answer to your questions: 1) Done. If you go to our interactive demo page, you'll find hyperlinks by the radio buttons that will allow you download DXF versions of each part. I chose DXF because I figured it's the "most importable" format. Thanks for the suggestion. 2) We're still doing our testing on hard metals, so I don't yet have a definitive response for you yet. However, I will just note that if you are machining a slot in hard metal, there is a tipping point where machining time is less with a series of full radial/light axial depth of cuts versus a peel-milling/trochoidal light radial/full axial style of cut. What I mean is, if you make the slot long enough, the full radial cut will have a shorter cycle time, even with many axial depths of cut and even if you have to slow down the feedrate in the slot somewhat. This isn't just because of the longer path length and the much greater percentage of time the tool is in the air; in my experience, a peel milling approach can be even slower than expected if the machine's acceleration is too limited. The flip side of this is that as you decrease the length of the slot, at some point short slots will be faster with peel-milling. Your point is well taken, and when we have more information we will definitely share it. We're keeping an open mind, and will adjust our approach if necessary based on the machining results. I do not believe we are inherently limited to aluminum, and if we need to adjust our toolpath to work better in hard metal conditions, we will. One of the really nice things about the client/server approach is that if we do find ways to improve the toolpath, we can deliver the benefits to all users immediately by upgrading our servers, and no customer has to upgrade to take advantage of the improvements. Secondly, to Cadcam, JParis, and Crazy Millman, I appreciate what you're saying about this delivery model affecting both dealers and customers. You've all made good points and we are seriously considering your comments to see what we might be able to do to make things easier and more attractive for everyone. Nevertheless, based on our testing, we think the service will lead to reductions in machining time and extensions of tool life greater than the cost of the service within a few hours of machining. Ultimately, we believe those benefits and others still to come will drive the adoption of the techology. Thanks again to everyone for the comments.

quote: Since your software requires an internet connection to function it is impossible to demo on-site and for the majority of propective customers to use.There are machine shops without an internet connection still, yes, but a majority? That's certainly not the case around here, is it where you are located? Shops I have visited around here have their own websites, and email is critical to their business. Many of them rely on email not just for business communication but also to receive part data from customers so they can machine it. As far as being impossible to demo, all a dealer needs is a laptop and an aircard that plugs into the PC-card on the laptop and accesses broadband cellular. It's cheap and means they don't have to plug into someone's network. When I was at Surfware all of our sales team had access to these cards when they were on the road so they could stay in touch with the central office anyway. This is very common nowadays.

Hello all, In a previous thread on this forum, there were some questions about VoluMill, our toolpath engine c-hook for Mastercam X and X2. To help answer some of those questions, we've set up an interactive demo on our website. You don't need an account or anything, just pick a demo part, set parameters however you want, and click a button to make a toolpath. You'll see some images of the toolpath as well as G-code that can be copied into your NC editor of choice. Of course, if you want to try it on your own parts, just download a Mastercam client for X or X2 from our site and sign up for the 15-day free trial. For those of you who didn't see the previous thread, a little background: Glenn Coleman and I were the principal creators of the Surfcam TrueMill engine while we were at Surfware. We left Surfware to create VoluMill (which has already beaten TrueMill in some early testing) with the goal of making available to everyone a toolpath that reduces cycle time while increasing tool life. The first incarnation of this is our VoluMill 2-axis pocketing service, with more to come soon. The idea of a toolpath service that generates toolpaths remotely may seem strange, but it provides a number of advantages to the end-user: no up-front costs, remote processing that can leverage the parallel speed of a server farm, and automatic upgrades and fixes that are deployed rapidly without forcing the end-user to take any action or buy faster hardware. If you cancel the service you don't get to generate any new toolpaths, of course (just like you don't get to make new cellphone calls if you cancel your service plan), but the other side of that coin is that you don't have to pay a large fee up front to own a license of a product that becomes quickly obsolete unless you enroll in maintenance. We hope you find it interesting and easy to use, and please let us know if you have any questions or comments. You can visit us at http://www.volumill.com for more information.

Glenn, Dealers are a critical part of our business plan, and we are already partnering with dealers to help sell, promote, test, and support the product. Our dealer partners do not pay to demonstrate the product, we think our partnership agreement makes it well worth their while. Please contact me directly through our website if you're interested in learning more; we'd love to talk to you.

There are some differences. As I mentioned above, Adaptive Clearing does really well on the outside of core parts (as you can see at the beginning of the video). Once it enters a channel, it seems to move to a trochoidal-like looping motion for most of the rest of the toolpath. TrueMill uses a similar motion to open up a new area, but then it goes around the opened area with longer racetrack-like cuts. If a part consists primarily of channels and constricted areas, I grant you, they will look quite similar. That's one of the reasons we pursued a different method for opening up channels for VoluMill, as I described above (going directly in, possibly with lighter axial depths of cut if the material or the stepover requirement warrants it). Thus far it's done very well and has performed noticeably faster than TrueMill.

mold100, Since I worked on the 3-axis version of TrueMill, I probably owe you an apology. You are right, it is nowhere near as good as the 2-axis version, and that has more to do with internal problems at Surfware which I am not at liberty to go into than with the underlying technology. You can sort of view it as the initial version of something that was going to be much better in a later release but was never improved. For example, if you use it to rough out the cavity of a bowl-shaped mold, I don't think you will be able to find any other roughing strategy to come near it. Seriously, for a part that shape, due to the much deeper cut depth and higher feeds, I saw it cut 5 times faster or more than typical roughing strategies. For cores or complicated stuff, though, it is noticeably less good due to lots of repositioning and bad inefficiencies. The good news for us is that VoluMill is going to be free of some of the technological challenges imposed by the TrueMill strategy, and we know how to avoid some potential pitfalls in our 3-axis roughing solution. I hope you'll consider checking it out when it's ready in '08.

CNC Apps Guy, You're absolutely right. The need for collaboration drives a lot of maintenance revenue, and that need seems to keep going up every year. This is one reason that I would not be surprised to see more subscription models in the CAD/CAM industry. In some ways, it's a natural evolution from purchasing software outright, to regularly purchasing upgrades, to enrolling in a maintenance program, to enrolling in a subscription service.

Hi Mic, Sorry, I may not have been very clear about the way new areas are opened. VoluMill does use a ramp entry (with no corners, it's kind of like taking a helix and stretching it out to a sausage shape) to get into a closed pocket initially, but any subsequent area that needs to be opened is opened with multiple depths of cut where the z value is constant for each depth, so it's not a ramp. So although less of the axial depth of the tool is engaged, it is true side-cutting, not cutting with the bottom of the tool. We do intend to offer the option of a helical entry instead of the initial ramp entry, but our tests to this point indicate that the ramp entry tends to save a lot of time. Often with a helical entry you have to do many passes because you don't want your z value to change too quickly; with the ramp entry you can often get to the bottom in fewer passes at a shallower angle than your limiting angle, and the path length is much less than doing the helical entry and then opening the rest of the area up.

Wow, lots of great questions. I'll see if I can respond to some of them. First of all, to Jeff, I don't unfortunately have access to the SDK for Mastercam 9, so I can't make a version for it at the moment, although I will look into the possibility of getting a copy. I am in the process of backporting it to some versions of X, however, and hope to have that out soon. In the meantime, you might find our Universal Client useful; it takes a DXF file of the part boundary as input and posts G-code out directly. Mic, to answer your questions, TrueMill keeps what you might call a "bounded" engagement angle, so that the engagement angle is never greater than a specified value. It can be (and often is) less than that engagement angle due to the requirements of the toolpath. VoluMill actually does not have a constant feedrate; it's adjusted when necessary to keep the material removal rate as close to constant as possible. This means, for example, that it will slow down slightly when entering ccw arcs in climb milling, but it doesn't have to slow down a lot because the toolpath never turns very sharply unless it absolutely has to on the final pass when negotiating a tight corner. Unlike TrueMill and adaptive clearing, VoluMill does not currently use looping trochoidal-like motion to open up pockets. Instead, if necessary, it uses multiple axial depths to open up new areas. Even though it fully engages the tool, by reducing the axial depth and removing corners from the fully-engaged cut it is still able to move quickly in these areas. Your point about making actual demo g-code available is an excellent one, and we are actually working on doing that right now through our website. I'll keep you informed. In the meantime, you might want to play the sample video on our site to get an idea of how the toolpath works; it shows what I'm talking about pretty clearly, I think. To answer your question about why it is better, I guess the short answer is that TrueMill is sort of an intellectually pure solution and has some drawbacks as a result. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of the work I did making TrueMill, and it is still making a lot of Surfcam customers very happy (and saving them a lot of money), but it has some inherent inefficencies due to the need to keep tool engagement strictly controlled. The biggest symptom of that is the amount of air-cut repositioning that occurs because of the looping cuts. Our approach seems typically to lead to the tool being in the material a larger percentage of the time, and a shorter overall path length while being able to run at similar speeds. Colin, let me see if I can answer some of your questions. I have a couple for you as well. You're quite right that if you no longer have a subscription you won't be able to regenerate a toolpath unless you reactivate the subscription. I guess the flip side of that is that if you are using the service that infrequently, it's much cheaper to have a subscription that you can turn on or off instead of an application that is basically shelfware most of the time and cost a lot of money up front. The internet does go down from time to time, which is a risk, but seems to be a very small risk these days, at least in my experience. Even if the internet goes down for a few minutes, the Mastercam client will allow you to program the part and just leave empty toolpaths that can be regenerated when connectivity is restored without the need to reset parameters or geometry. Your question about processing time is an interesting one, and I'm not sure I understand it fully. I actually view the remote processing as an advantage rather than a drawback. Given a choice between calculating a complex 3-axis toolpath locally on a single desktop machine versus calculating remotely on 20 servers running in parallel, each of which is an order of magnitude faster than my desktop machine, I would choose the remote calculation and 200x speed improvement. We do not yet have our 3-axis service running, but we anticipate this will be a key feature. With the remote calculation, there might be a hit purely related to data transfer to and from the server, but with compression and broadband I'm guessing this won't be much of an issue. We've done some stress tests of this nature with our service and we haven't even noticed the transfer time. It's possible, though, that I did not understand your point correctly. You are right that many people are simply not on maintenance any more; the percentage I'm sure varies from company to company, but I seem to remember that on average, slightly higher than 50% of customers of the major midrange CAM companies are on maintenance. Interestingly, I've heard that it's significantly higher with SolidWorks for whatever reason. We guessed, possibly wrongly, that most off-maintenance customers would be happy with what they have and would not necessarily be that receptive to what we have to offer, whereas customers on maintenance are used to monthly or yearly recurring fees and might appreciate the fact that they don't have to pay a bunch of money up front to get started. We'll do our best to keep an open mind, though, and I really appreciate your comments. Thanks!