COE : Forums : love display tool path on current PO. How about display current tool, or sub tree?

Dave Frank

love display tool path on current PO. How about display current tool, or sub tree?

October 30, 2020 06:00 PM

Hi friends,

We all love display tool path on current PO. You can eastly see tool path , rt click and center graph... even copy / cut & paste on the "green stuff"

I would love to see the functionality also allow a check box to display the tool path limited to the current tool. Or perhaps if easier for R&D a sub tree?

How about you? agree

A Top Ten?

Thanks

Dave

Dave Frank * Dasco Engineering.

NC Programming Lead

COE Product Co-Chairman, Digital Numerical Control

Samarinder Singh Cheema

RE: love display tool path on current PO. How about display current tool, or sub tree?

October 31, 2020 03:58 AM (in response to Dave Frank)

Hi Dave,

Yes it would be nice to have this option. But I have managed to do it using Hide/Show on the entire program's activities. So you don't see it all the time but you can hide/show any MO individually. Last year I demonstrated to my Lead at work and he really liked it. But there was another super user got a bit nervous when he saw some activities were dimmed since they were in Hide mode. Sometimes people get scared with unknown stuff.

Anyway it is a very cool feature if you are doing a large part using feature based programming with machining processes (MPs). Here is small video I posted a few year ago. Pocketing Thin Walls Floors

It helps you see it what features have been programmed and what is remaining. So you can always follow a good cutting strategy which helps reducing any possible warpage in the part. In this case I was roughing every other pocket and going from inside to out. It was pretty large part and came out within .002" on a very large 6-axis machine we used to call it a boat anchor because it was very hard to get a good part with tight accuracy on that machine. But I took it as challenge and built some special MPs with some special toolpaths for thin walls and thin floors.

Regards,

Samarinder Singh Cheema

LinkedIn Profile

Edited By:
Samarinder Singh[Organization Members] @ Oct 31, 2020 - 01:11 AM (America/Pacific)

David Bissonnette

RE: love display tool path on current PO. How about display current tool, or sub tree?

October 31, 2020 12:56 PM (in response to Dave Frank)

Hi Dave,

Yes- displayed tool paths are great! If you only want to see the tool paths of a particular tool you need to structure your programs a little differently.

If you make a different manufacturing program for each tool, you can hide each program individually. When it’s time to output APTSource, choose “output by selection” and select all the manufacturing programs with the various tools and Catia will output them all in one APTSource file.

Cheers!

Dave

Samarinder Singh Cheema

RE: love display tool path on current PO. How about display current tool, or sub tree?

October 31, 2020 04:19 PM (in response to David Bissonnette)

Hi Dave,

Although you can write a small VB routine, I think it would be nice if there is an option( in Right click context menu) to hide all MOs under the Tool-Change nodes and another option to post one file for each Tool-Change. But I had to use the posting option only twice in last two decades.

Regards,

Samarinder Singh Cheema

LinkedIn Profile

David Bissonnette

RE: love display tool path on current PO. How about display current tool, or sub tree?

November 3, 2020 11:15 AM (in response to Samarinder Singh Cheema)

Yep, I agree. In the meantime this method is how I get around it. Our workstations are pretty much locked down for any kind of automation and Catia is able to hide/show individual tools if you use this method. It works very well and you really get to love the speed of selecting MOs graphically rather than searching for them in the spec tree.

cheers Samarinder!

Dave