I've been wondering about this one for a while. When I started writing chooks a few years ago I was under the impression that other than mastercam there were only 4 or 5 companies and maybe a handful of people writing chooks. Recently I was talking with someone and was left with the impression that wasn’t entirely true. There were actually quite a few companies writing them, but like several I maintain, they are so company specific there’s no reason for anyone else to use them. My question is, other than the few ‘big’ companies and mastercam, does anybody have an idea of how many shops are actually writing chooks? A handful? Dozens? Hundreds? None? Thanks again Bryan

Thanks for the comments everybody. I really do appreciate them. I live and work out here in the boonies and other than coworkers (hi Kevin) I rarely get to talk to other mastercam users. That’s why I like this forum so much. Ron, I know what you mean. It’s a nice feature being able to delete all drill points. Of all my chooks it’s the only one I really scratch my head over and say, “Why the hell doesn’t mastercam do this?” Every mastercam user I’ve talked to wants this and many people on this board have expressed a desire for it also. Go figure. Speaking of requests: Changing Insert Pattern. The ability to insert a pattern with a color and/or to a level and/or override attributes. Not all or nothing. C’mon mastercam, PUUHLEEEEESE. I'll give you a cookie. (Yes, I filed an enhancement request way back when v8 was beta testing. And yes I know v9 sort of does this with the Entities Attribute Manager but I hate turning on and off all those check boxes every time.) iowajim62. Trim both. That was actually a request from my new supervisor. It sounded like a neat little function when he suggested it. I’ll tell him someone else is getting a lot of use out of it. Bryan

First, I wanted to thank everybody for the great response to my chooks. I glad other people can find some use for them. Second, I forgot to mention originally that these are for 8.1.1 mastercam. Hopefully I'll have ports to version 9 in the near future. And lastly, I have one more chook. It wasn't ready when I updated last week. My guinea pigs.. I mean coworkers have tried it and it seems ready to go. It’s at the following link editarcs.zip It called Edit Arcs and allows you select multiple arcs, then either set all their radius (radii?)for all the same amount, or offset their individual radius out or in by a set amount, or scale them all by a set amount. All changes are around their center points; the radius changes not their xyz position in space. The link should work until this weekend when I can update the main zip file. After that just go to the main page and download the latest release. Bryan

Hello everybody, I just wanted to let everybody know I’ve updated my chook package. Found at my website. There’s a minor update to the insert Hardware chook. It now has an option to use the Z height off the main menu. Also of note, a previous update changed from having one default pattern to having 36 preset pattern files. Each preset file has its own setting for color, level, attributes, etc… I’ve also added several new chooks. Keeplevs. Keep levels. Or the long name - Keep all levels turned on where I've selected an entity on that level and turn off all other levels. Trimboth. Trim (or extend) both ends of a line equally to new length. A previous update included a chook call Nuke. This chook shuts down mastercam without prompting you to save your file or asks you if you really want to exit. It just shuts mastercam down now (nukes). Warning, if you don’t save your file first data will be lost. Enjoy Bryan

Use 8.1.1 for toolpathing and design Currently beta testing 9.1 The rest of the department uses 8.1.1 also. Back when 9.0 came out I couldn't recommend spending the money for the upgrade. 9.0 seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of bug fixes with some cosmetic/interface changes tacked on to justify the version change. With that being said, I've been testing 9.1 beta and like it a whole lot. If the boss decides to upgrade the department to 9.1 I'd be a very happy camper. But with things still slow I don't know if x-dollars for the upgrade will translate into x-plus-dollars in savings from increased productivity, fewer toolpath errors, etc… Bryan

it's in the math functions m_math.h (chapter 8 in documentation) get_view_matrix Given a view number, return the matrix. boolean get_view_matrix ( /* returns FALSE if no view with his number */ short v_no, /* I: view number */ matrix_33 v_mat); /* O: view matrix */ Hope that helps Bryan

Doh! I can sympathize. Never had this happen in nine but a few years ago on a Friday I did our normal daily backup of jobs and one of our designers worked late on a important job. He stayed late Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and came in early Monday morning. Ten Minutes before I get in his system crashed. bye bye file. After that we automated backups overnight. And through out the day the system backs up any file worked on in the last hour. At the most if a file is deleted or overwrote you loose an hours work. Bryan

One 'trick' for deleting all drill points many people use is to create a new drill operation with no geometry. Then replace the geometry of your old operation with the geometry of the new (empty) operation. Then delete the new op. You then have your original operation with no points. Which has always made me wonder why no such option is available in mastercam. With contours you can go into the chain manager rearrange the chains or select them all and delete. Surfaces have a wealth of toolpaths on how the cutter behaves and has a ‘remove all geometry’ option. With drills you have to manual delete every single point. You also have several pages of sorting operations that range from ‘ok’ to ‘what the heck is that supposed to do?’ Does anybody actually use anything but the first page of sorting options? The control of geometry in drill operations seems rather weak when compared to that of other operations in mastercam. Anyways, enough ranting. Have fun. Bryan

Hello all, I've updated my collection of chooks for 8.1.1 They can be downloaded here http://ivanxxxx.com/mastercam.html Updated: crlength: create line at length. Can now create points and arcs at either end of the line. I also tried to make the drawing of the lines less jerky. New Chooks delalldr: delete all drill points. delete all the drill points for a drill operation. The install.txt file contains directions on how to add it too the empty menu slot in the geometry manager for drill points. sortpts: sort drill points. Choose a start and end point and the chook finds the (approximate) shortest path through all the drill points. Bryan

Hey Bullines, Speaking of hacked software. That screen shot of Kazaa looks a lot like the hacked version called Kazaa lite. Bryan

Duckman, Are you looking for ASCII format or ASCII STL format? Bryan

thad, Basically the program is free. But the author asks that you register the software for a nominal fee. Bryan

I just keep telling myself: ....it goes up in the long run ....it goes up in the long run ....it goes up in the long run Bryan

thad, Try a program called Rtvreco. It automates tasks in Windows by pressing buttons in dialog boxes, menus etc. I have mine setup to press NO every time that annoying dialog box comes up. It's not fixed on the mastercam side but at least it gets ride of it. It can be downloaded from: http://www.clearlight.com/~rtvsoft/RtvRecoLatestVersion.htm Bryan

You can change the toolbar and assign hotkeys under screen-configure-toolbar/keys tab Bryan

Hello all, I've made available on my website some of the more general chooks I've created . You can download them here. bryan's chooks I hope other people can get some use out them too. Bryan CHOOKS: bWCS: Simplified version of the World Coordinate System found in Version 9 for 8.1.1. crlength: Create line at length. crpt2pts: Create a point between two points. detdiam: Creates detail diamonds. hardware: Works similar to Insert Pattern but you can choose to insert into Main Level AND/OR Main Color AND/OR Main Attribute. menu: Allows you to create custom menus in mastercam. notecopy: Copy the text from a note into the clipboard. notepaste: Paste text from the clipboard as a note. notelist: Creates a list of notes from the clipboard or a text file. rawblock: Creates a stock definition based on two points and the *current* cplane. The resulting stock definition is saved out as a stl file. setviews: Allow you to set Tplane, Cplane, and Gview to named planes quickly. x2many: Translated entities from one point to many points.

First off I wanted to add my "me too" to getting a look at some chook source code. Including more examples in the sdk would be great. I'm sure there has been many times where I've reinvented the wheel writing chooks where the developers at Mastercam probably did it better a long time ago. Bullines wrote: quote: If something isn't in the SDK, then it's not there at all. That's not entirely true. I've noticed a few items either missing by accident or by design. You really have to read through the header files since not everything listed in the documentation. For example: Listed in m_draft.h but not in the documentation there are some really useful functions for reading Mtable Items (note text) from external mastercam files. mTableReadStart mTableReadItem mTableReadEnd And some items are just not there. Of the various file types, only a portion have their path prefix listed. You can look through all the docs, example files, and all the headers files and you won’t find how to get the STL file path. Nada, zip, nothing. But it you add EXTERN char *stl_prefix; patterned after the other prefix's, it works fine. Hopefully added documentations is in the works. Bryan

Check out the m_db.h documentation. Quickly scanning through it I see: get_db function will read a file into the database. merge_db will merge a file into the existing database. read_ent will read individual entities from disk. Hope this helps. Bryan

To add a "#" to a post just use its ascii code. For example "#" is ascii code 35: n, 35, "sometext", e should output something like: n1 #sometext Hope this helps Bryan

from the help file: Saves a regen (*.RGN) file for the surface toolpath for faster toolpath regeneration. Which I believe means mastercam stores some data about the last surface toolpath regeneration so it goes *much* faster the next time you regen. There is a button in the system configuration - start/exit tab - so you can specify how long to keep the files. hope that helps bryan

I've uploaded a version 8 chook to the ftp site ftp://mastercam:[email protected]/Ma...0forum/C-hooks/ that will allow you to do this. The file name is menu.zip. Add whatever chook or mastercam function you want to the menu.txt. You can then replace any mastercam menu with this chook. The install instruction included in the zip file are a little rough but go into more detail. Including how to do submenus.The instruction also mention a bitmap. Ignore that part iI haven't created one yet. Have fun Bryan bryan[at]steeplechasetool.com

Filters are wonderful things. Depending on the part, surfaces, tolerances, etc you can get some nice reductions in your NCI and G-Code. 5, 10 50 or more percent. We have one machine with limited memory and this has saved me many times from having to breaking up the program into many files. The ‘create arcs’ is ALWAYS unchecked or some of our machines have brain farts. Luckily we’ve never had a costly oopsy with the ‘create arcs’. We usually leave that to the ‘surface rough pocket’ operations. Bryan

When my boss asked about upgrading to v9 I recommended he not upgrade. We don’t use solids so maybe I didn’t see all the fun new features. Version 9 does have bug fixes and some nice UI tweaks I would like have. But with things so tight I couldn’t recommend paying money for bug fixes and UI tweaks. So, I have to agree with a previous poster that it should be called 8.2 or maybe even 8.5. Bryan

DAMMIT IT KNEW IT. The next time a part comes out wrong I'll tell my boss it wasn't my toolpaths it was that the part in the steel was wrong. Bryan

Yes it works for design and draft. Which has saved me a lot of headaches. Bryan