how about a mobile phone skin or whatever you call it. "i-emastercam" or "emastercam mobile" for my iphone would be sweet.

I have used camtool on a IBM dual core AMD opteron system with 4 gig of ram and a nvidia graphics card. and it absolutley smoked. Camtool can process 8 parallel calculations at one time, depending upon the number of cores your processor has. I think at this time its a perfect compliment to Mastercam. I was able to increase step down and step over amounts and still get better finishes and shorter run times than Mcam. Processing times were far superior, tool collision detection, deletion of air cuts and so on...... But it can't do what mastercam can do and vise versa. I think "right now" a perfect world for me would be Mastercam and Camtool. To properly use camtool be prepared to spend money on high end PC. The more cores the better and lots of RAM. I kinda heard in the wind CNC Software may be trying to incorporate background processing into a future release. Nothing concrete mind you just a rumor. I anxiously await............

Have you considered buying a usb to serial cable. You could have as many serial ports as you do usb ports.

Is there a way to minimize the transfer status window for X Editor.

Kelly, I think you would have to use 5 axis drill. At least that is how I have had to do it in the past.

For me its hard not to have more than one session open at a time. We machine Die Cast Molds for GM and they are terrible about last minute engineering changes. Especially on there new 6 speed program. Currently I have about 7 engineering changes that have to be added to my current project. Thats just this time. Not to mention that that there are several different die series in the 6 speed line that are basically the same die but with slight differences. So I made one file for all the common operations and other files for only the engineering changes. Since toolpaths are associative to the geometry they were created with its very difficult to go back and swap one model for another without a huge time investment. So in my case it makes sense have more than one session open. To be able to run my current ops and make new ones for engineering changes in another file. Its my fault that I didn't keep up with my backups, not mastercams. But its mastercams fault in a way that I have to in the first place. Now before ya get out the flame throwers just know I'm a huge fan of mastercam and I don't want to use anything else, but come on... if we cant rely on it to keep a viable file what the heck do I need with new toolpaths that process faster, so I can get back to where I was faster. Time is money. The more time I have to spend redoing what I have already done the less money my employer makes and the less money I make. I don't like less money. It also affects my credibility. Myself and another person here were huge activist in the push to replace Work NC and Edgecam as our cam software. It made sense one software for two. But when you have to explain time and time again that mastercam did this or mastercam did that and this is why we have to do it again...well they tend to get that tone in their voice that says "yea right". They don't want to hear that we spent all this money and it don't work sometimes. Sorry a little long winded. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I like mastercam and I think they're doing a great job. Those little red X's have a tendancy to rev up the "tude"

I had one open and minimized and another one open and trying to backplot a toolpath.

216 OPERATIONS 0.0KB AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!! Stupid me had to open another session to check something

edmBosto The problem I have had with verify is that my video card is only as good as my employer thinks it needs to be. Hence verify takes a long time to process. I'm not trying to blame mastercam for the mistake...I should have caught it. Ultimately it is my responsibility to make sure its right at the spindle not just on the computer screen. Sometimes a person gets lulled into a sense of saftey because of what cam software does for them. We forget the basics and tend to rely on the computer to do it all for us.

I did not mean to upset anyone by jumping on the flame wagon. haroldm and jleal you fellas seem to be pretty stand up type of guys. I hope that you'll counsel your co-worker to make an appearance and prove you right. If I offended you I apologize. TimH

I've had one major issue with tooling and construction planes being changes around or not associative. Unluckily for me I did not catch it before it got to the part. What griped me was that this was a file that I had used time and time again so I was confident that it was okay. I backplotted, everything looked OK so I ran it. The problem was is the wcs was right but the tooling and construction plane was not. It took the values from the wcs origin and applied them to the T/C planes as well. So everything was offset incremetally by the values in the wcs. What I want to know is how come when I backplotted it looked OK and not out of location? This cost me big time. Partialy because I "ASSUMED" that it was right and because I thought I was right. Oh well live and learn. I'll know better next time.

So why doesn't 1966cont come apologize to guys. If you fellas found the time he could too. Or do you have hime tied up in the corner teaching him some etiquette the old fashion way.

I guess I'm unsure as to what say is wrong. I originally did all of the "figuring out" on my pc. Once I was fairly sure it worked I just copied everything from my pc to the three other computers we have. Everything worked ok on them. I used the scriptlinker utility here on the forum to make the .ft files. Maybe try and run the vbs files though the scriptlink utility again and make your own ft files. Or just delete the ft files and run the vbs files from the menu commands. unless someone else might have some idea whats going on. I feel bad that this isn't working for you like its supposed to.

what was it?

Hey Lou, I went back and checked the file locations listed in the install.txt and thats where my files reside at. I'm not having any startup errors and it seems to be working ok. Do you intend to try again? Let me know. I hate to think I put something out there that doesn't work. I apologize for any inconvenience. Tim