From the course: Learning Mastercam for SOLIDWORKS

Simulating the operations

From the course: Learning Mastercam for SOLIDWORKS

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Simulating the operations

- [Instructor] In this video, I'm going to show you three different ways to verify and see what's happening in your machining operation. Now as we've gone through this course, we've done a whole bunch of different tool-paths, and it's generally a really good idea to either backplot or verify or even simulate what's going to happen in the machine when you actually start cutting. So to get started and do that, the first thing I want to show you is Backplot. Now Backplot is pretty straightforward, so if you have an operation already completed, it's ready to look at, I can select it right over here with the check mark. I'm going to go ahead and just choose that first one right there. Or if you can choose both of them if you'd like, and then click on this little icon right here called Backplot selected operations. Notice, because I only have the check mark on the first one, it's only going to backplot that operation. Go ahead and click on that one there. And you can see we get our tool, we've got a holder, and you can toggle these things on or off. Right, so let's go ahead and turn those back on, so we can see them and then come down here to the bottom of the screen you can see we've got play, stop, rewind, and so on. And let's just go ahead and click on play. You can see it's going back and forth, back and forth and machining this part so you can see all the lines of where this part actually goes to. And if it's too fast, you can of course you can slow that down, you can rewind and you can grab this little play head right here and you can just go back and take a look at anywhere you would like in that tool-path operation. So that's the first one called Backplot and notice down here you get this info one, if you click on that and twirl it down, you get a bunch of information. So right over here is a very important thing called Cycle Time. It says it takes 13 minutes and 13.24 seconds to do this machining operation and that might either be a great time or really terrible time. And if it's not the time you're looking for, you might want to look at your operations and see if there's something you can do to speed up that cutting process or maybe switch to a different tool and maybe do a comparison between a couple different operations to see which one's going to get your part done sooner. All right, that is Backplot . The next one is going to be Verify. So, notice right up here I have the Verify selected operations, right next to Backplot, click on that one right there. It opens up another window for us and it processes it and you can see we've got this block which is the size of our stock and then come down here and click on the play button and very much in the same operation. This does it more in a 3D model so you can actually see the final part and where the actual cuts actually go into that piece. This is very useful to make sure that you are getting what you're expecting to get from this operation. Of course we have a bunch of other options over here, we can rewind, fast forward, and so on, we can adjust the speed slower or faster. And then of course we can show and hide a bunch of things here at the top of the screen. I don't have time to go through every single option in here, but definitely jump in and try and backplot and verify your operations before running them on a CNC machine. I'm going to close that down one more time, and then the last one I'm going to do is what's called Simulate. Now simulation takes a little bit more setup because you have to choose the machine, you have to choose the right type of machine for the part you're doing and so on. But let me just show you how that works. So right up here under Machine Simulation, come down to Settings and that's going to pop up here and you can choose a whole bunch of different machines in here that you might want to use to verify your operations. Let's just go and use this one here, which is seven, and then we can use a selected elements because I don't necessarily want to machine the table I have here set up over the vice. I just want to select the piece that I'm going to be putting in there. I'm a go ahead and select Bodies and select that body there, click Okay and fixture you could add a fixture if you wanted to, but in this example, let's just go ahead and run this. So click on Simulate. That's going to open up a brand new window and it takes our block and it puts it in a simulation of a CNC machine, right? I can then come over here and run and you can see what it's going to look like when you're actually machining this part in a CNC machine. So of course, depending on the type of machine you have, you want to choose something very similar to that to do the simulation in. And it will tell you if there's going to be a crash or any other major catastrophe as long as you choose, of course, the right style of machine that matches what you actually have in the shop. So those were a couple different ways you can take a look at the operations that are going on in your Mastercam program. So I generally recommend, do each operation and then do a quick verify or quick backplot on it, just to make sure you're getting exactly what you're expecting. And then when you get done with the entire job, select everything and make sure you do a verify, to make sure there's nothing that's going to crash or you're going to get some kind of weird tool-path or some cut that you're not expecting in your job.

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