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alexlikesyou

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  • Birthday 07/21/1986

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  1. We have Force and it actually works really well but there is quite a bit of dialing in. Ball mills require the most tweaking from my experience so far. Trying to balance all the settings so you don't hit light speed as it approaches the tip or drop to 1 ipm can be tricky depending on your application. On some of the big screws i've used it on it drives hours out of machining time. On the last big Inconel screw I used it on that translated to eliminating an entire shift. The charts and all the information they provide are very useful too. I'm a sucker for a good chart.
  2. the "sgcode" string variable is defined by default in a table. Example from the IKE post # Motion G-code selection sgrap : "G00" #Rapid sglin : "G01" #Linear feed sgcw : "G02" #Circular interpolation CW sgccw : "G03" #Circular interpolation CCW sgdwell : "G04" #Dwell sgcode : "" fstrsel sgrap gcode$ sgcode 5 -1 example from MPMASTER # Motion G code selection sg00 : "G00" #Rapid sg01 : "G01" #Linear feed sg02 : "G02" #Circular interpolation CW sg03 : "G03" #Circular interpolation CCW sg04 : "G04" #Dwell sgcode : "" #Target for string I think the issue really just stems from somehow it's looking at the NCI 1011 field number which is for misc reals and loading that into the string instead of a gcode value it would understand (0-4 for G00-G04).
  3. So I've been trying to get tool inspection point working. It seems regardless of what post I start out with (MPMASTER, MPFAN, or the new IKE) if put any value besides 0 in mi8 it will give some form of this error (this one is specifically from the IKE) depending on which post: 21 Aug 2023 08:25:51 AM - RUN TIME -PST(4067,4067)- The value of the string select selection variable is out of range:1011 This seems to point to the "sgcode" string every time regardless of what post is used. I just can't seem to track down where this could be happening to try to resolve it. edit: accidentally posted this in the wrong area.
  4. the biggest downside is the time you'll spend playing operator whisperer trying to convince them everything will be okay.
  5. Tangentially related to this topic-- My actual educational background is 3D Animation and Visual Effects. Weird string of events and I end up in this trade. Story for another day. One of the advantages of that sort of work is you can easily push all your processing and rendering to a farm. Obviously this is a bit more useful for programs like Max and Maya since a complex render can take anywhere from hours to literal days. Having 500 computers each rendering a single frame each is really the only way you can get some stuff done before the heat death of the universe. Can you accomplish something like with mastercam on an obviously smaller scale? It would be great to just have a couple of rack mount stations you could just push stuff to that would each process a tool path with. Seems like you could maybe accomplish something like this with Batch but a lot less intuitively/conveniently. The need for something like this is probably pretty low since not many people are constantly regenerating like 100 operations at once. So I can see why you wouldn't spend the resources developing it. There's a lot of parts I do that are close enough to others that I do a lot of importing operations and rechaining/reselecting and I'm pretty much done. I guess I am just aware of how much of my life I've spent watching a render/processing bar. lol
  6. So after the suggestions here I ended up changing my approach on this part I'm working on now. While a bit time consuming, I made a solids to use instead of generating stock models for the in process roughing. I broke up my initial roughing passes a little more and opened up tolerances by quite a bit until I was starting to get collisions then backed it off. Massive improvement. Those particular toolpaths regen times got cut in half. I still put in a request for a desktop, so they're going to have me get together with IT so I can get away from working from my laptop all the time. I've been lurking these forums since like 2015 and i pick up something just about everyday that makes me a better programmer. I really appreciate all the help and advice you guys give.
  7. Definitely going to pick up one of these air vacuums. Luckily they are very supportive of my work here so if I need something they'll usually have no issue spending the money. Total opposite of my previous shop! I'm still mentally in that penny pinching place. I'm probably going to put in a request for a desktop. Everyone else around here uses surfaces. So there's probably a few lying around. I think I might try the remote desktop route for when I'm on site.
  8. Thermal throttling is definitely the biggest issue with the laptop. The convenience of being able to undock it and wander over to the engineering building or to some place on the floor (the shop here is massive. like a 5+ minute walk to some machines from my office) which makes having a laptop nice. The Xeon in it overclocks to 4.8 ghz but it can't hold that for a long time under full load. It turns into the surface of the sun. My rig at home, which I have watercooled, processes things much faster even at a slightly lower clock speed just because it can maintain it.
  9. I recently got them to invest in Vericut (still getting used to using it) so I might revisit using axis sub where I can. Before I just kind felt like I was flying blind because I didn't have a way to verify it after offsetting it. Something I really don't want to do on a piece of stock worth a quarter million dollars. Now I can probably get away with confidently using it more now that you mention it. Definitely agree/noticed solid models when used as a stock model generate significantly faster than an STL. The engineers we have here are not that great at modeling so these more complex things usually fall into my lap. Lots of "it looks good on a print but the topology is totally unusable to drive toolpaths" sort of problems. Circling back to my "i guess I need another workstation" issue. I'm just kind of hitting the acceptance stage that there's no way around this. Yesterday my laptop went about nuclear when trying to adjust a model in solidworks to get the sizing I needed while regenerating a toolpath and fried a couple components so I'm trying to get away from trying to multi-task on a single workstation now.
  10. For most of my programming career a "big" part for me was like a 16 inch block. Now at my new job that would be considered tiny. A good portion of what I'm working on now are fairly complex feed screws that are 15 to 24+ inches in diameter and 300+ inches long. The biggest hurdle I'm running into is literally how long it takes to process some toolpaths. If I need to adjust a lead in or something it'll take like 2+ hours to regen a single path if it is looking at stock model. You multiply this by the 20+ paths I need to regenerate on some parts and I do like 5 minutes of work to like an entire day of generating toolpaths. Also, mastercam's little quirks and bugs that used to happen rarely seem to happen constantly on large parts. This is basically the workflow I've been trying and I'm just wondering if there's some better ideas on how to handle this sort of thing-- -Get the Mastercam and Vericut projects set up -Chop up the model into smaller sections -Block out (I don't know if there's a better term for this) the toolpaths by turning my tolerances up and not using any stock models so toolpath regen times are reasonable -Don't even bother wasting my time to verify most operations in mastercam and just use vericut because the tool constantly just flies through the part when the tool plane changes. Tried fixing this by adding multi-axis link to a bunch of things but it still sends the tool "home" when using verify but doesn't do it for backplot nor does it post this way. If mastercam's verify does decide to work fine it will start giving me unexpected errors. -Save out STL's to cut down on having to constantly regenerate a stock model if what I'm changing doesn't really change where there's going to be stock. -Regularly run repair file as Unified Multi-Axis will start throwing errors anytime I try to use it or open a path's parameters if I'm working on a part for a while and this seems to fix it for a while. -By this time if I'm mostly happy with what I'm seeing I start using stock models to trim down the paths. Sometimes I can create simplified geometry for a stock model and this reduces calculation time but sometimes its just not all that easy as most things are wrapped around a helix. Toolpath regen times start to really jump. -Try to avoid rotary advance when I can but ultimately end up using it most of the time for roughing because my use case is pretty much exactly what it's for (offset continuous milling). Lament the 1 to 3+ hour regen times per path. Feel joy when it only takes 35 minutes. I'm seriously considering requesting a second workstation and using it to batch process so I could at least do some work while it's processing rather than stare at the multi-thread manager all day.
  11. About a year ago I was hired at my new company to replace their programmer who was retiring. He was a bit of a packrat so when I was cleaning out his (now my) office it was like opening a time capsule of Mastercam/general CNC related stuff. I started using mastercam at like X7 so seeing manuals and stuff for the versions nearly as old as I am was pretty wild.
  12. I started working in a shop that uses all FANUC controls and coming from a shop that used nothing but HAAS. I was curious as to why the memory was so limited on these machines and this makes a lot of sense. Learn something new everyday here.
  13. We've got this gearcutter with a fanuc control on it. Previously they programmed this thing in a really old version of Surfcam and I'm trying to get it set up properly in Mastercam. The cutter used is a saw/slotting tool but I program it like a ball mill in the morph toolpath so I can keep the tool at X0. The issue I'm having with this is I need to offset the Z output for the cutter. I've been going into cimco afterwards and just adding the length I need (in this specific case 4.0 inches) to get the output I actually need but it would be great if I could just skip this step. I've set up in MPMASTER a prompt when I post to ask how much to offset and now I just need to know if there's an easy way to add this to my Z out.
  14. I'll use 2D dynamic with transform rectangle with sort point to point when doing CBs like this. Assuming they're the same size.
  15. I have the Corsair K70 at home. I love it. Smooth action. Really sensitive keys. Almost too sensitive at times. I constantly accidentally press keys just by resting my fingers on whatever keys I just pressed. Very satisfying clicking though. Then I come to work and use the generic dell one I've got and it feels really weird. I don't think there's much difference between the K70 and the Strafe outside of backlighting.

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