Friday, November 20, 2015

view X Y Z moves line by line

In the 3 Autodesk CAM products we know that in the simulation environment you can see the X Y and Z moves as it is being simulated.  But, what if i didn't want to go into the simulation environment to see the tool movement?  What if I just wanted to view the Cutter Location information?
Well, let's see how we can do that.
Have you ever expanded a toolpath and see the 3 Children items under the toolpath?  There is that last one that has a file size on it.  If you were to right click on that icon you will get a right click menu.  Towards the bottom of this menu you will see a selection called "View Toolpath".

Once you select the View Toolpath a dialog will display that shows you the type of move being performed, the X, Y, Z moves, feedrate, and spindle speed.  it will also show compensation if you have a different compensation turned on.


Friday, November 6, 2015

initial tool library excel template available...

I know I posted a couple of weeks ago that I was working on a template in Excel to speed up the creation of a tool library.  Well, it is still a work in progress, but I thought that it could still be of some use.  So, there is a download link on my Tool Libraries page that you can access the excel template.  once you download be sure to place it in the templates folder of Excel.  Then anytime you need to create a library just start a new document from that template and run with it.

If you do use it some I would definitely appreciate any feedback. (don't be too harsh because this is still a work in progress document...lol)

free cnc simulator...

This one is for the Fusion users and maybe some of the Inventor HSM users.  If you want to look at doing machine simulation for just that extra little bit of verification.  Check out this site: http://cncsimulator.info/
They offer at least one free seat of the program and it is a small install.
I just downloaded it and am going to start working with it some.  If anyone out there is already using it; would love to hear some feedback on it.