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Eric Allen

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Everything posted by Eric Allen

  1. This is my temporary work from home configuration. My work desk is a little deeper so I can sit a little further back. Also, you can by VESA monitor stands so you can tilt and rotate the screen like a monitor. FWIW, the audio is passed through the Quadro Displayport connection and the TV speakers work fine. It's nice not having the clutter of speakers anymore.
  2. I bought a single 43" Samsung UN43RU7100FXZA for each of our 4 programmers. We got them for $300 each from Amazon. We found Displayport to HDMI cables that support 4K 60fps. With a couple of setting adjustments on the TV they play nice with Windows 10 and our Quadro cards. For the money, I think this is so much nicer than dual screens with a split at the center of your vision.
  3. Thanks, I'll look into how to send an enhancement request.
  4. I'm programming the part with the blue face which is at 36 degrees to the C platter. I import my Parasolid to Mastercam so that the top plane is on the blue face. I do this since I play with the angle a lot to make all of my parts fit. If I made my Parasolid origin the bottom center of the subplate it would create a lot of other problems for me. I make my WCS for all operations the bottom center of the subplate. Due to the angle I must turn on "transform into WCS". With automatic position turned on it's off by a lot. Am I doing something wrong? To me, I should be able to pick a plane in machine simulation (like my WCS) that aligns with the origin in my machine simulation models. FWIW, I create all of my own machine simulation files. Thanks for any help.
  5. Thanks again huskermcdoogle for your Excel file. I took it a step further and made it so you can just copy both lines from the report and paste it into the attached Excel sheet. Excel then picks out the proper numbers and fills the cell. I'm no Excel expert, but after enough Googling I got it to work for me. Machine Simulation Translation.xlsx
  6. I think I figured it out. I need to make my WCS for my operations oriented to my subplate that I want to sit flat on the table. I had it oriented to the angle of the part.
  7. Does this method allow for rotation? Does Machine Simulation have a way to tell it what plane to reference or a way to manually rotate? In the attached SAMPLE MC file and the picture you can see that Machine Simulation is oriented to the MC top plane and ignores my WCS. I want the large cylinder (subplate) in the picture to lay flat on the table. I understand that a solution is to move all of my geometry and planes so that my large cylinder is oriented to the top plane. This isn't practical in my actual file because I keep bumping the angles of the pyramid to adjust for clearance. There must be a solution to this! Keep in mind this is a sample file using the stock Mastercam machine config and machine simulation. In reality this is a very complex job. SAMPLE.mcam
  8. We moved all of our Mastercam files into our PDM system. This had a few benefits. One is that the files are saved to a local drive, but still synced to the server. PDM also requires that files be checked out and you can see who else has it checked out and is working on it. Lastly, there is a revision history and you can quickly see any old version. I think this has been a huge improvement for even our small programming department.
  9. Nice, I wasn't changing the UserCFG location. I'll try it out and report back. Thanks!
  10. Thanks Chris. I've narrowed it down to being when I change the My Mcam location. If I change locations inside of Mastercam the CURRENT_USER key is updated and it works, but if I just change the CURRENT_USER location Mastercam crashes and then changes the key to C:\program files\MCAM 2019 The reason I don't like to change it in Mastercam is there is no way to stop it from overwriting the My Mcam files on the server. I'm forced to make a copy and then overwrite them back. I want to automate this in the registry of I can.
  11. Could you expand on this? Every time I try to edit the registry to point to the proper server locations it crashes Mastercam on open
  12. Nice! I'd like to add that keeping a few old versions of this folder structure has been very helpful. We have one computer with multiple old versions of Mastercam installed. More than once we've opened an old Mastercam in a new Mastercam version and had issues. We've then been able to go to the computer with old versions installed and see how it opened there.
  13. Here is the folder structure I've created. Notice in the first image that we have a folder for each major release. That's so we can have multiple versions installed while we transition to a new version. We also discovered that breaking our custom holders and tools into its own folder is critical. If you open a Mastercam 2016 file and the tools lived in the since archived Mastercam 2016 folder then we'll get warnings for missing tools. Inside of the major release folder we have an individual my mcam folder for each user and a common shared mcam folder. Lastly, there's a temp folder we've been playing with as a place to store NCI or other temp files. We currently found that pointing NCI files to a local disk folder works better. One problem we are still having is files being overwritten on a new install of Mastercam. When we start the fresh install of Mastercam and point the my mcam 2019 folder to the network location it overwrites everything in the server directory. This happens even if we tell Windows not to overwrite them. We've found it best to either point to the server location in the registry or to make a copy of the my mcam directory before pointing. We've been using this folder structure for three years and have been very happy with it.
  14. Thanks Günther, that works great K2csq7, that doesn't work with our workflow. We do a lot of similar parts. I like to make a copy of the good Mastercam file, open it, delete all the old geometry and insert a new Parasolid. I can then backplot all the dirty operations to see what they used to do. Sometimes this doesn't work due to NCI errors, but it's better than trying to keep the old file open and refer to it. Unless you have a better suggestions for this workflow?
  15. This works great. Thank you. Any way to assign a ribbon button to it?
  16. I lost a lot of time dealing with this "feature". I just found that switch today. Too bad that couldn't have defaulted to being unchecked!
  17. When I upgraded to 2019 Mastercam started simulating the home position in verify. This seems like it could be useful, but has given us some big problems. When I run machine simulation I'm getting overtravel alarms for the axis since the home position is out in space. The only reason we use machine simulation is to check for overtravel which makes this problem that much worst. We've also noticed that when we copy an operation and apply a different place that it will retain the old home position. On our five axis simulations this causes the tool to start inside that part and show a big crash. I would be fine simulating the home position, but it seems to be very erratic. It seems that the home position is related to the work offset instead of to a global position. This causes every hold to need to have the home position dialed until it doesn't over travel. Can anyone confirm this behavior?
  18. All of our shop computers are blown out and cleaned every quarter by a trained shop maintenance guy. We lost 5 power supplies in a month a while back on computers that were in a clean office. Some of them actually started smoking. It turned out we were having brownouts (SDGE) and the power supply didn't like the low voltage. I have since installed UPS's on every computer that I can. I also made sure every computer had a surge protector with at least 700 Joule protection. I was surprised how many "power strips" we had.
  19. I just wanted to thank you guys for the closing and reopening suggestion. I'm embarrassed to say that I spent over a half hour trying to fix this in X9 before checking the forums. I never once thought to restart the program. It appears this bug has been around since at least January of 2012. I'm holding my breath for a fix.......
  20. Are there any active reports experts out there? I'm looking to pay someone to make Mastercam X9 spit out the attached excel file. We currently use X+ tool list and then paste that into a template. The problem is that there is no X+ for X9 yet and more importantly, we are at the mercy of a 3rd party vendor. We would like to invest in a Mastercam solution. The attached file has the fields filled in that I need. The "cam cycle time" is a function of the other cycle times and wouldn't be an output. The empty fields will be inputted manually in Excel. The results need to be like X+ and show the tool list for the selected operations. I'm not sure I'm aloud to post jobs so if that is the case then I would simply ask for a suggestion on a vendor to help me with this. Thank you. MILL TOOL LIST.zip
  21. I figured it out. I was on the wrong page of the X+ website and I was actually downloading a Mastercam service pack. My translation failed me. Thanks anyways
  22. My dealer made a few suggestions. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks again.
  23. Thanks for taking the time to look at my code. I actually didn't hard code the programmer, customer and part number. I tried to come up with the longest possible name and put those in for the text. The data field is still set to PROGRAMMER, CUSTOMER, DESCRIPTION, and MACHINE. I really only need one setup sheet for now. We have 30 of the Mori mills and that makes up most of what we program. We have other machines, but only have one or two of each. We also make our setup sheets in Solidworks so all I need from Mastercam is this glorified tool list. Every field is very important because we have been getting the same data from X+ for so long and our setup guys are used to it. I now notice that I have another problem. The tools are not sorted and some tools are called twice. Are there any companies that I can pay to fix this for me? I need to get this doing ASAP and I don't want to learn any more VB. Thanks!
  24. Problem is the Technics holders we use have a decimal in the part number. We have been assigning them to tools for a long time so we have a lot of programs already using them. X+ was able to recognize this without a problem, I don't know why Active Reports would have a problem.

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