Another ditto with Zero. Try changing your tolerances or stepover up and down. Bumping one of these up a tad will probably help. Also try Analyze->Surface->Test Norms and Analyze->Surface->Check Modal. They might find a bad surface your not seeing. If you're dealing with a several surfaces you may have to remove them individually to find the bad spot. Bryan

Cg wrote: quote: how about when the operators come in with a broken endmill and say this was the last one.. You forgot the part where it was the fifth to last cutter and they ran it five times. And it broke the cutter in the same spot. Five times. And they ran it again and again. Five Times. And then they come in.... Bryan

The first 8 Planes in MC are set... top, front, iso, etc... As you create new planes they are consecutively numbered. This can be from saving plane, or toolpathing, or rotating the view. When you save and reopen a file any planes that aren't saved or current views or used are dropped and the remaining (ie saved) planes are renumbered from 9 up. Bryan

WhooHoo my hundredth post. Bryan

quote: I hate it when People are always touching my Screen/Monitor, Doh, I do that ( I try not to. Honest ) It drives my coworkers crazy. "I see Bryan's been at my desk again." Adjusting my chair height. I work 2nd so my desk is community property on 1st. My chair is always messed with or missing. I think its pay back for the finger prints. How about leaving partialy filed pop cans, coffee mugs at your desk. Mmmmmmmmmm mold and ants are your friend. quote: Me: "What job is that?" Them: "That new one" I get similar converstions but the operatiors usually bring in the paper work so I look it up on there. I've had this one since a child. Mispelling my name. It's Bryan. B-R-Y-A-N not Brian, brain, brion, ... First times free. Second time I hunt you down. [added by bryan 4/17/03] I can't believe I forgot this one. It turns my stomach. The inability of people to flush and wash their hands. C'mon people our mommies taught us this when we where 2. Bryan [ 04-17-2003, 11:05 AM: Message edited by: bryan314 ]

Let's see, 1. If you just signed up for the forum, and it's your first post, and you ask for a post processor more than likely you're a pirate. Your dealer should be helping you out with your post processing needs. If he isn't then I'm sure a many person here could recomend a better dealer. If you done all that and still need help the forum is where you need to be. There are a lot of knowelgble people here. 2. Saying Mastercam sucks and not giving a reason surely will get you flamed. Providing examples of what you thinks is a problem or limitation will generate constructive conversation and get you help. 3. Uh, yeah. Everybody is here because they want to not because they are being paid. Being rude will get you nowhere. Do I think Mastercam is perfect? Hell no. And I've said so on many an occasion. Do I think it allows me to get my job done in a timely maner? Hell yes. And to prove I bitch about Mastercam, J Coulston has pointed what is becoming my personal pet peeve. The inability to remove all drill points or to individually move one point in the sort order. J Coulston, First tell your VAR. He's one point of contact Mastercam has with it customers. Second send a feature request to [email protected]. Maybe if they get enough requests they will finally realize the amount of people wanting this feature. Until they do... Way to remove points: 1)James pointed out in another thread by holding down both the right and left mouse button you can delete as fast as you can move the mouse. 2)Create a blank drill op. It will have no points. Replace the geometry for the drills with points with this dummy operation's geometry. 3)I provide some chooks I've written over the years at Bryan's chooks One of the chooks will delete all drill points for an op. I currently have packages for 8.1.1 and 9.0. The 9 package should work for 9.1. I'm still waiting for my 9.1 cd and the updated chook developement kit. Bryan

Hi students. Remember D->A->E and answer yes, this solves all problems. Bryan

In response to James... All those that want Mastercam to add a 'Remove All Points' for Drill Operations please raise you hand. I'll start: Me me me me... And yes I sent this request to [email protected] waaaay back when v8.0 was in beta testing. Bryan

Somewhat boring week this week. Some medium sized square blocks with a few surfaces. Couldn't tell you for what kind of part. With all the jobs I've been bouncing around on lately I lost track. Wednesday, I swear must have been a full moon or everybody had spring feaver. I must have got only an hour of work done. Everyone decided today was the day they needed new software installed. Old software unistalled. My computer won't start. How do I open excell(Don't ask he's ONLY been using the program for over a year? ) My email doesn't work. Oh, can you install that new software for me next. And on and on. After ten hours of this I thought I'd have to shoot someone. The rest of the week was fun, got to work on chooks. Upgraded a couple of interal ones. Work really sweeeet now. Of course my beta tester at work (hi kevin) is already asking for more Improvements. Wrote my 3rd wirepath today. Now everybody repeat after me. Ooooooooooooooooooooooh. No one started yelling so I assume it ran fine. And, of course, had to end the week with a bunch of trim steels That have to be run tonight! So, I expect that they will be run across the mill on Tuesday. They're re-wiring the office this weekend. First weekend off in along time. Yeah for me. Now I'm waiting for my son to wake up from his nap so we can have dinner and go play trucks!! Bryan

A previous boss walked my through MC and toolpathing about 3 1/2 years ago for a couple a weeks. Some supervision and me asking alot of questions for the next few months at which point I out lapped him. Took off runing and haven't stopped since. Now, discover stuff on my own, the forum, or bounce ideas of the other toolpathers. Post Editing: Self taught. Thrown to the wolves situation. "We got a new mill, Here's what the NC should look like, here's a general post I was told should work. By the way the machine needs to run tommorow." (doh!) Pressure is a great motivator. Been tweaking our posts and setup sheets ever since to make my life (and I guess the operators) easier ever since. Chooks: Mostly self taught except for a really really big push at the beginning. The people at MC have been saints. And about once every six months I bug them with something I don't understand. It would probably be more but I only program chooks part time in between my 'real' job of toolpathing. Bryan

You're welcome. It's a nice stop gap solution but I wish there was a way to output analyze type information for the entire file or for selected entities. Maybe output to a txt or csv file. Bryan

From past experiance as beta tester, Mastercam has fixed every bug I've reported to [email protected] except one. I'm waiting for my 9.1 disk to see if I need to re-report it. qc couldn't reproduce it even though I could on everyone of our computers (win98, nt4, and 2000) and in version 8.1.1 and 9.0. Feature requests and tweaks I'd say 1 in 4 on a good day. It's my opinion is they could do better in this area but then again it's my opinion and I haven't heard anyone else express it. Bryan [ 04-10-2003, 06:12 PM: Message edited by: bryan314 ]

If you want a 'txt' file of just the xyz points try: File->Converters->Ascii->write file. If you want lines, arcs, points with some lengths and don't mind it being messy: Analyze->Contour->Window (the enties)-> It'll ask for a point just pick one on the screen ->Done->3d or 2d ->Enter a Comment-> Save the File Bryan

Oh creating an analyze chook I have no problem with. I'm pretty comfortable with the clipboard. I feel I have a good grasp on the basic entities in mastercam. The sdk itself provides much of the information I would need, like 2d and 3d distance. The entities themselves would provide the rest. Like radius, color, level, etc for an arc. Then like you said it would be a matter of offering up the apporiate values to choose from to stick in the clipboard. Like an arc would be weighted towards x, y, z, radius, and then maybe color and level. I just realized I only need to copy things like the z level and such rarely. Most of the time doing like Rekd suggested, editing the entity, works fine. I always have a notepad next to my keyboard and that takes care of the rest. I felt the Bang for the Buck factor wasn't there. I could spend and hour, day or whatever on the chook and probably only save 20 or 30 minutes in next year. Fortunetly I have other ideas/projects with more time and costs savings I could better put my time and effort towards. Bryan

Rekd, I wish the prompt area was a label or text box then you could use the MFC GetWindowText Function or something similar to read the text from the control. It then wouldn't matter if it were disabled or whatnot. Unfortunately its a Static Class or Static Control. Which doesn't allow reading the displayed text since it's basically a bitmap. I looked into this a few months ago with hope to use some OCR code to get around this problem. I had hoped to use a chook that would grab the statisbar bitmap run it through the OCR and then play with the resulting text. Unfortunately it just ended in frustration for me. I ran up against my own limits, I just wasn't smart enough or a good enough programmer to figure it out. The limit of MC using a static control that I’m sure makes a lot of backend code simpler for them. Finding usable OCR code isn't fun either. The consumer packages cost money (lots) and aren't small downloads. I wanted to keep the chook small and free. And most of the free stuff is just college kids messing around with AI software. Not really practical. Or the code is oriented to mass scanning of documents for archival reasons. I don't have the time or energy to hack through a large project to whittle it down to practical size for me. A coworker (hi Kevin) came up with the idea that I should just write my own simplified version of analyze. Then you would be able to pick and choose what text to stick in the clipboard or mess around with. Eventually, I just decided the effort far outweighed the benefits. I had/have a dozen other projects that my time is better put towards. Oh well. On to bigger and better things. Bryan

Analyze blows chunk. Solution 1) What Rekd said. 2) The prompt area in MC isn't realy text it's just a bitmap with text written on it. Sorta like if you enter text into microsoft paint. It's there but it itsn't. I really wish mastercam would redesign the prompt area so you can copy the text out of it. This is usually one of the first complaints I here from our desingers when they first start using MC. Especialy if they come from a system that has a history function. I believe I sent copyable text as a feature request waaaaay.. back when 8.0 was in beta. No luck so far. If you realy need to copy the prompt area look for a program called Kleptomania or other programs that are similiar. What they do is take a screen cap of your screen (or highlighted area) then run it through an OCR routine. The resulting text is stuck into the clipboard for pasting. The downside is these programs are quite expensive. Bryan

Moldpluss rules! I use it many many many times a day and find it a great tool. I use it a lot for the surfacing stuff and not electrode. Since I don't use the Electrode part myself I can't give you an opinion on that. For the stuff I use, In my opinion, it's well worth the price. But (there's always a but) you should evaluate it yourself to see if fits YOUR needs. I have no idea if they a have any kind of trial setup (I'm sure they do) but I'm sure you're dealer can bring it in and demo it for you on your own parts and files. Bryan

Just at you Bryan [ 04-07-2003, 12:48 PM: Message edited by: bryan314 ]

My first reaction was, cool. That's pretty neat. After a little thinking I have to say NO. There are probably a lot of lurkers, myself included, who pop in and out all the time and would just clutter it up. A better option would to list on a thread by thread basis who has posted to that thread. Maybe if your settings are for threads from the last day, list who's posted to that thread for that period. If you do implement it I have to agree with Mark include a setting to exclude yourself. I would even say set to OFF by default. Bryan

Doh! Teach me not to refresh before posting I see you solved it. Bryan

Ah, surface rough pocket. It's made a few paper weights for me over the years. Mark, What settings are you using in verify? In the verify options in the display group area is the quality vs speed slider bar. I find if I leave .030 with a cut tolerance of .005 and the slider is at the middle tick I see gouges that aren't really there in my part after a later finish pass of 0. I usually use the second best qualty and on occasion the best quality. The 'gouges' disapear at these setting. Bryan

Clean bathrooms? Now that's just crazy talk. Next you'll want them to wash their hands afterward. Bryan [ 04-04-2003, 07:56 AM: Message edited by: bryan314 ]

plasttav, You're welcome. I hope you enjoy it. quote: May be somebody thinks that it is c-hook without any need at all , but I have a lot of cool things to do with it. I've had that attitude in the past but have found that it comes back and bites you on the xxxx. Just this week I had to use a requested chook I put together a few months ago. I though I'd never have the 'situation' it required but it happened. The chook save me a bit of time fixing it. If I may ask, what are you cutting that you offset a spline a 100 times and cut them? Relief maps? Bryan

I don't have access to the solids module. But the selection function is set to all_entities so you should be able to select and change the color for individual solids. Bryan

Ok a little bored this morning. Parody of eMastercam ColourSurf Page Color Entites Chook Price: No Charge - Over A $400 Value! MC Versions: 8.1.1 / 9.0 Surfs: $50 Points: $50 Lines: $50 Arcs: $50 Splines: $50 Drafting Entities: $50 Those annoying little floaty surfs that you can never get rid of: $50 oops forgot solids: $50 (added by bryan 4/2/03) Plus much more ------------------------- = $400.00 The Color Enities download is a zip file. Install to your C-Hooks directory and launch the application by pressing [Alt+C] in Mastercam and selecting colrents.dll. Produced in 2003 by Bryan Vanxxxx * Colour Entities varies colors in an array to a create a patch work effect. Excellent for working on large parts or just wasting a lot of time. End Parody Bryan [ 04-02-2003, 10:41 AM: Message edited by: bryan314 ]