"Really Soon Now"

gcode, Parasolids: Not anytime soon, I think. Not many people have requested it, although everyone asks about. . . STL: Already working in house for the next version. Best regards,

quote: No, I didn't see this. After running the MC upgrade, I ran MC and MCU was there with no warning, no options or anything. That's what got me so upset.That's the part I'm missing. The code that installs the Mastercam related options is never called by just installing Mastercam. The code is contained in our Partners.dll, and the only way for it to run is to hit OK on the first dialog I included above, or to go to our setup pages. If you had some way that MCU options were installed to Mastercam without running MCU (that you know of), then it's something I'd have to investigate. If it's somehow possible, then even the second dialog above probably wouldn't be enough. BTW, if there is something missing in MCU that would make it more useful to you, please let us know. Best regards,

Rekd, Maybe we are talking about two different things. Did you see this after the first time you ran MCU? This was the first opportunity to install our Mastercam options. If you had hit the red X button, or selected "No Options", nothing in Mastercam would be changed. Also, if you never ran MCU after installing Mastercam, there would be no changes to Mastercam. Now, the first time a user runs MCU (and I think this is what's in SP2), you see this, and there is no easy way to accidently install our options. Best regards,

Iskander, quote: I don`t want to argue a lot , I want to tell that when I installed it first time I was furious ! It changed icons menu order, I think I already responded to everyone who was surprised at the install, but I do want to point out that it did warn before doing anything. Since then, we’ve changed it so it’s inconvenient to activate to make sure there are no surprises. quote: it`s "standart" comments are only Fanuc standart. Do you think all the world runs Fanuc ? OR I must mess with a post at work for such a little thing ? We don’t insert any particular comment style since we insert 1005 style NCI comments into the operations list. To the best of my knowledge, if the post is setup correctly, the native comment style should work. The only complaint I know of that is valid is that on some controls the comment can be too long. In that case, we make provisions for tools to be loaded via a machine set, so a series of tools can be predefined and loaded all at once. Although not as convenient as inline definitions, it gets the job done. The worst case scenario is you temporarily enable tool definitions, and edit them out before sending to the machine. quote: They lost my trust ! And when I don`t trust a thing I am not messing with it ! You are certainly entitled to that, but at least be aware that there are a lot of people who are not having any trouble with MCU, and derive a lot of benefit from what is included with Mastercam. quote: Stupid me ! You are from a developing company. That`s a different talk . I believe my public comments speak well enough for how we operate. If you have any doubts, you might want to check with some of the respected forum members who have been familiar with my company for years. quote: I have a lot more to tell . In the near future cause I am busy now. Do you prefere a private letter or it does`n matter you ? Your preference is fine, although I’d probably prefer public so that anybody else who is having the same problems you have had can get benefit from the exchange. Best regards,

The graphical interface map is in Help|Help Topics, then in the menu, Interface|Interface Map quote: cause crashes to the mastercam,adds some stuff to the posts and IMHO is demanding a lot of work and changes to be done to be called the class A productCare to elaborate? I don't know of any instances where MCU causes Mastercam to crash. Also nothing is added to the post; if MCU is told to, it adds standard comment operations that are posted normally as comments. For everything it's designed to handle, it works seamlessly with Mastercam, and if it doesn't, I'd certainly appreciate a bug report.

You should be able to fix this by editing your exporttwood.t and inserting the following lines at the beginning of the InitVariables() function: variables { string Trashcan ; } x = 0 ; y = 0 ; z = 0 ; outputs(Trashcan,x,y,z) ; This essentially just sets the initial values for X,Y, and Z to avoid this kind of modality issue. If you have any trouble, you can email us and we can make the modifications for you.

Sorry folks, I'm a bit slow on the draw on this thread; this is the first I’ve seen more than the first few posts in it. I've been busy making, well, changes to all this, among other things that have kept me working insane numbers of hours. At first, we sat down with CNC and came up with this sadistic plan to annoy every single customer, but figured it'd be tough to make *every* single one mad. So we settled for making some of them mad. No, that's not it. What really happened is everyone thought this would be a good idea, and we honestly tried to make it apparent what was going on. Here's the sequence. MCU was installed with Mastercam 9.1. It doesn't do ANY integration with Mastercam until you run it the first time. When you do, it asks you if it's ok to install the Mastercam options, and gives you the list of the things it's going to change. It also gives you a chance to not install any or all options you don't want. It even mentions how to remove the options once installed. If anybody wants to see this dialog again, delete the MCU.CFG file from the mcuuser directory and start MCU. All this behavior is identical to the downloaded version of the trial version. From our side, we thought this was enough to keep users from being surprised/mad. In other words, if you install 9.1 and you don't start MCU and then hit OK to our Mastercam integration dialog, absolutely *nothing* is done to your Mastercam installation; it's completely clean. In reality, the whole scenario misfired. Our normally good ability to discern what the customer wants and will do was flawed, and it was compounded by not being able to REALLY easily correct the situation by uninstalling or simply removing the installed options. It was even further compounded by a bug (publicly patched soon after the release) that after 30 days, the Light version that every Mastercam customer is entitled to stopped working, so anybody who didn't get the patch thought this was a very bad marketing idea that installed some parasitic program that turned off after 30 days. Our intention was to give all Mastercam customers g-code backplotting ability that we normally sell for $100, and give you 30 days of our full suite of features. Obviously, both CNC and NWD stand to benefit if you decide to purchase the full package, but we felt it was important to give permanent value (MCU Light) to Mastercam customers if we were in the install. It sounds great for the customers from this side of the fence, but it didn't get received the way we intended. So, now we (NWD) have made it much harder to install Mastercam options. After installing, you have to explicitly go to a setup dialog and set the options you want. There's no way to accidently install options that you don't want, and if you do somehow do it, you did it in the exact place you need to go to to undo the integration. So, for anybody we've offended, I'll personally apologize and take full responsibility. You can blame me personally, if you like. I wrote the software that does all this, and as a partner in Northwood Designs, I put my stamp of approval on the install and first run sequence. The lack of having this in the Beta versions of Mastercam was also squarely in my court since we did not have the final MCU install at CNC in time for the last beta cycle of 9.1. I’ve invested an unspeakable amount of hours in MCU, and I’d be stupid to throw away all those hours by alienating any of you. The last thing I personally want to do is make even a small number of people have *any* kind of negative reaction to my software. Most shops can find a use for MCU Light, and many of those shops would benefit from the full version. If our intentions misfired for you, I apologize on behalf of NWD, and you can rest assured we take all of this *very* seriously and would never do anything that we thought might annoy CNC Software customers. We even took a risk in including a $100 package to make sure we didn’t agitate Mastercam users. So if you’ve missed it by now, I’ll repeat. “I’m sorry”. Best regards,

Brent, click here to email me; I avoid putting my direct address on any forums anymore now that spam is out of control.

Brent, MCU doesn't have gcode 4 axis, but we are always adding support for additional code. If you send us gcode and preferably along with a MC9, we can get it in our pipeline for a future release.

Brent, Would you mind sending us that part that has the severely bad time estimate? I'd like to look into that.

Everyone is sort of right about us and DNC. We don't have built-in DNC, but we do work well with other DNC packages via our "Send To" menu. As a matter of fact, it works very well to setup CIMCO Edit OEM for that purpose, and you get both our backplot and CIMCO communications, which is a good combination and all built into Mastercam 9.1.

Try re-installing MCU from the Mastercam CD. When you insert the CD, select "Install Products", then "MetaCut Utilities 2.1" Alternatively, you can browse to the "MetaCut" directory on the CD and run the setup from there. Once you've done that, then retry the patch. If you still have any trouble, let me know.

Greg, You need to refresh your browser, most likely. That is what the old page from last week said. Try this: Patch maestro, Check the file size; it should be 671,744 bytes. You may have had a problem during download and retrieved a partial download.

tmachine, The extraneous MCU button has been removed in the patch that was referenced in another thread: http://www.eMastercam.com/cgi-bin/ultimate...ic;f=1;t=005994 Sorry for the late reply; I'm not in the office much this week.