Generate toolpath

- [Instructor] Once you have all your machining operations done, now it's ready to post-process those operations and generate some G-code. Now before you start generating G-code, we want to check a couple of things. The first thing I want to check is under Job here, right-click on that and say Edit; and right here at the very bottom of that we want to take a look at what we're trying to do. So right now I have this multiple work coordinate systems turned on. Let's go ahead and turn that off because we only have the one part. We wanted to verify our program name. I'm using 1234; you can make a comment on there, which is fine, and verify your work offset, right. Notice we're using G-54 in our program, and right now I want to choose work offset number one, which is also going to correspond to work offset G-54. So that all looks good. So make sure you verify these values before you post it out because that's what's going to show up in your posted out program. All right, click Okay. Now, notice all these operations became dirty. No problem; click on the top operation or job here and click on Generate Tool Path. It's going to go ahead and process all those tool paths, and now we're ready to post-process. So right over here is post-process; click on that. Now, if you've already been posting out things, more than likely, you don't need to change anything here, right. All you got to do is basically select post, but if you did want to make some modifications here as far as the program name or number, where you want to post it out to or save it to, or if you want to switch to a different type of machine, you could do that as well. Same thing over here is you have a bunch of options to do with that post, so you can look through those. If there's anything you need to change, go ahead and do that; but right now, let's just go ahead and post this thing out. So click on Post; all right, let's go ahead and choose the desktop. I'm going to click on Exercise Files; it's going to be Chapter 5, 5.4. And let's go ahead and post that right there. Right, that'll open up the editor; and now you can see the actual G-code that's produced from those operations we've done. So you have that facing operation. If you want to scroll through here, you can see the facing, you can see the drilling, here's the other drilling operation, the tapping operation, the adaptive clearing operations, and so on; so you could see that's all right here. Also take a note on this adaptive clearing, you can see how much code is actually produced when you're running an adaptive clearing routine. This is all adaptive clearing. So it's really a lot of code when you're creating adaptive clearing routines. So keep that in mind, especially when you're using an older machine. Sometimes thousands of lines of code just won't work that well on an older machine, and you might need to use a regular pocketing routine, which uses a lot less code for older machines; but in this case, most new machines, no problem. You can have as big of a program as you really want and just load it up and run it. So that's adaptive clearing. This is the editor; and this is a great editor, by the way. It's got all kinds of great tools. Take a look up here under the editing tools, the NC function; you can remove lines, and you can renumber things. You can cut, paste, and so on. You can do a whole bunch of stuff in here. You can also compare files, which is great. So you can bring up an old program and a new program and see exactly in line by line what changes have been made and find those things. You can also transmit to your machine if you have an older style machine, you're using like an RS-232 port or something like that. You can transmit your program to that machine or you could even do a DNC. So a whole bunch of options here in the editor. I definitely recommend using this editor because it's probably one of the best ones I've seen out there.