NativeCAM is Features renamed

George,

I've had the same problem, trying to drill to the tip depth, not the shoulder depth as NativeCAM does by default. The solution I opted for was a quick modification of the cfg file to supply an option to program depths to either "Tip" or "Shoulder" - I was going to suggest this modification to Fern earlier on here, but forgot to.

I'd be happy to supply my modded cfg for reference.

Philip

Phillip,
Well it nice to see I am not going crazy and others have had similar issues. I appreciate the offer of your CFG file but will wait a bit to see if Fern makes changes to the program, that way it won't be over written in updates.

I was experimenting more, it seems to get actual Z depths of less than about .050-.060 is impossible. I selected a #59 drill, 135 point angle, .0001 depth of hole and Z goes to just over -.050 actual travel.

I think your mods are a good approach to the problem. Hopefully Fern will incorporate something similar.

I understand,

My copy of NativeCAM is now heavily modified, so I just pick and choose when updates come, a bit of a pain, but I like the work flow it gives me now.

A quick solution, for drilling at least (I've never used the spot-drill), is to set the drill diameter to 0.0, since this seems to only modify this 'tip-length' calculation.

orpheus wrote:

I understand,

My copy of NativeCAM is now heavily modified, so I just pick and choose when updates come, a bit of a pain, but I like the work flow it gives me now.

A quick solution, for drilling at least (I've never used the spot-drill), is to set the drill diameter to 0.0, since this seems to only modify this 'tip-length' calculation.

Thanks for the great tip !!!!! I changed the spot drill dia to 0.00 and it works as you say!

George and Phillip, thanks for your suggestion and comments. I just added the option in tool tip angle. A quick work around could also have been to use the reamer as a mill but without drilling option.

That -0.050 is set in 'Workpiece', the 'Through' param that is used when you want to make sure it goes through the workpiece. If you want to go exactly to the bottom, use 'Bottom' as the option for 'Drill down to' or 'Cut down to'

I should upload to github later today with other significant improvements.

Phillip, have you made other improvements that you wish to see included in NativeCAM ?

Regards
Fern

Fern,

Not many changes to code - just one or two things in that respect -

Facemilling doesn't (Or didn't at the time I looked) work in a stepped manner - if the cut depth was greater than step depth, it did the first, then stopped.

Finishing passes - I wanted my finishing pass to be at the full depth, instead of at stepped depths

My solutions to both these were at the machine, not in the VM on a development system, so are kludgey and definitely not in the spirit of the rest of the NCam code!

The rest of the changes are mostly the flow of the program, removing some menu items I'll not use, moving some things into new menus.

The last thing I'm looking into involves a modification to provide a 'hook' to ensure when the tool-table component I've built updates and saves the tool file it informs NativeCAM, but that's fallen a little behind, since I've decided to re-write my HAL, creating a single C component to drive the machine front-panel and do away with the mess currently running it

Overall the system is great, and I have to say thanks for a great tool Fern!

Philip

orpheus wrote:

Facemilling doesn't (Or didn't at the time I looked) work in a stepped manner - if the cut depth was greater than step depth, it did the first, then stopped.

It was designed like this, I think I will review it

orpheus wrote:

Finishing passes - I wanted my finishing pass to be at the full depth, instead of at stepped depths

I will add the option in preferences, do not expect it this week

orpheus wrote:

The rest of the changes are mostly the flow of the program, removing some menu items I'll not use, moving some things into new menus.

If you are talking about menu.xml and the subroutines available, make the changes you want and save it under menu-custom.xml, it will use it and will NOT be over-written

Regards
Fern

FernV wrote:

orpheus wrote:

Facemilling doesn't (Or didn't at the time I looked) work in a stepped manner - if the cut depth was greater than step depth, it did the first, then stopped.

It was designed like this, I think I will review it

From reading the code, I thought that was the intention - honestly the situation as only occured once where I wanted to go deeper.

orpheus wrote:

Finishing passes - I wanted my finishing pass to be at the full depth, instead of at stepped depths

I will add the option in preferences, do not expect it this week

If this could be an option in the tool-change.cfg, it'd be better, as sometimes I don't want to plunge the tool the full depth, for example, with long cutters, but short flute lengths. It's not time critical, so I won't be crying out for it any sooner!

orpheus wrote:

The rest of the changes are mostly the flow of the program, removing some menu items I'll not use, moving some things into new menus.

If you are talking about menu.xml and the subroutines available, make the changes you want and save it under menu-custom.xml, it will use it and will NOT be over-written

I'll make a note of this - I had noticed it printing to console about not finding this file; should have looked further into that

THanks again, Fern

Philip

Regards
Fern

FernV wrote:

George and Phillip, thanks for your suggestion and comments. I just added the option in tool tip angle. A quick work around could also have been to use the reamer as a mill but without drilling option.

That -0.050 is set in 'Workpiece', the 'Through' param that is used when you want to make sure it goes through the workpiece. If you want to go exactly to the bottom, use 'Bottom' as the option for 'Drill down to' or 'Cut down to'

I should upload to github later today with other significant improvements.

Phillip, have you made other improvements that you wish to see included in NativeCAM ?

Regards
Fern

The .050 I spoke of was not the "through" parameter at work, in all my test cases I had the depth set as "User" and set at .0001, still I was getting -.050 to -.060 depth of cut due to the calcs for tip angle and tool diameter.


None the less, I think this issue is well under control with Ferns coming changes.

Fern, I thank you so much !!! I have made some pretty complicated pieces with NativeCam.

George

I just updated github with the changes to tool-change.cfg, new icons, etc

read catalogs/customize and locale/translating

also, this is a transition to a deb package and the setup file is nondeb_setup.py

I am afraid I forgot to update README.MD

Regards
Fern