I'm using TurboCAD/CAM to produce G-Code for a MHP/Moog Hydra Path 3 control.

If any of you are familiar with this control, you know that it checks G02 and G03 radei, and if they don't match down to three decimal places, it faults.

This is a good thing, this way you are always turning the radius you wanted, but the pinch happens when TurboCAD/CAM generates my G-Code.

I have sat down and checked the radei by hand, and have found variances of as much as .012", more than enough to cause my control to crap on itself.

So my question is this: Has anyone else ever had this problem with TurboCAD/CAM? If so, were you able to fix it, or find a work around? If so, what was it?

I could call IMSI, but I really don't want to give them $10 to tell me that there is nothing I can do.

BTW, just to get this off my chest. Does it steam anyone else to give $1000 for a piece of software, and then have to pay $10 a call for tech support? Especially when its about a bug or glitch that they know about, but do not bother to tell you about in the release notes.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Hi Neomoses,

I don't have any experience with that software. However, I find it unusual that it would be posting faulty code from a perfect drawing. Computers don't generally make mistakes with numbers, that's what they do best :)

So, check your drawings carefully for accurately trimmed entity chains. Never rely on a chain gap setting to "get you by" because something has to give when it comes to accurate nc output.

Also, try drawing at a higher accuracy, say one order of magnitude more accurate than your controller uses.

In order to produce perfectly trimmed drawings, I rely on geometric construction methods (but I am not using your software). This means roughing in a drawing in sort of what I would call "block form", using horizontal and vertical lines to represent every intersection of the part, and trimming these entities to one another to create chains that are perfect. All fillets and chamfers are created afterwards, again using automatic trimming of the block drawing I roughed in.

Hope something I've said will help you out in your circumstances :)

I was fairly certain that the drawing was good, but just to be sure it was not my fault, I totally redrew everything. I let ACAD do all of the fillets etc.

I was still having the same problem.

Buckled, and called tech support. They informed me that the CAM portion was taken over by a new tech support company. So I called them, and for the first three times, I got no help, and no call back like they promised.

I was steamed, so I called again. This time I got in touch with head of development for IMSI. He handed me off to one of his head engineers when he went on vacation.

This guy informed me that I had found a bug that no one else had noticed, and that he had his Russian Software Engineering Department (In Russia) working on it, but I would not get a solution before the first of Sept.

That made me angry again, as I have been waiting for a while now anyway.

He happened to mention that the V2 beta did not have this issue, so I asked if I could DL the beta to get me through.

He posted it for me to DL, and told me that a patch would be too time consuming to develop, so they would upgrade me to V2 when it ships for free.

Cool.

So I DLed the Beta, installed it, and started TurboCAD. It crashed immediately, and would not restart.

Angry agian.

Emailed the Russian dude, he told me that V2 only works with TurboCAD V9.1 (the latest version) which costs almost $200.

Bummer.

He then said that he would post it for me DL free of charge.

That got my attention.

We are now up to the present. I have DLed the new CAD, but I haven't got it installed yet. I'll update when I find out if this is gonna help me or not.

So its not just in Tisdale, Saskatchewan that we have stuff happen that nobody else has ever seen before ;)

Indeed, it is not the only place.

Apparently, it happens in Belle Missouri as well.



On a happier note, it appears that the new version (v2) of the CAM plugin, and the newest version of TurboCAD (v9.1) have fixed my problems.

I just output the same program that was giving me problems, and the control checked all 12,500 lines of it with no faults or issues.

Now, if my blown gearshift solenoid would show up, I would be in tall cotton.

. . . . Until somthing else goes wrong. :eek:

Thanks for the suggestions Hu.