Build Thread- APT_CL-Has anyone used APT in this century?

[rapidtraverse]

I need help in understanding APT-CL.

Recently I have gained the responsibility to program an operation that uses APT. At first it was a bit daunting; I thought it was archaic, but after I dug into it I discovered how practical it is.

Although I am picking it up, if anyone could give me a little insight about the post process, tables and processes I would greatly appreciate it.

[BobWarfield]

Rapid, I don't have a huge amount of info for you. What I can tell you is that APT is a representation of the internal geometry created by the CAM program. Most CAM directly processes APT or the internal geometry data structures when it shows you a simulation. This is why a lot of folks find g-code driven simulators useful--they find problems your CAM simulator won't.

There are generic post processors and other utilities out there that can process APT. I think Vericut will process APT, though not totally sure of that.

It's pretty cool to access the geometry directly on CAM that supports APT. Not really archaic, it is just incomplete compared to g-code because CAM only needs a subset of the g-code.

Cheers,

BW

[SBC Cycle]

Is this any help?

APT360 Programmers Manual

http://ied.unipr.it/silve/meaz/origini-APT.pdf

There's a guy on here, Dan Falck, that can probably tell you just about anything you want to know about APT

[camsys]

Oh My, I used APT in the last Century, both APT and ADAPT. As I recall
the CL data is rather sstraightforward, with distinct codes arranged with XYZ coord data.

You would need a CL data format guide, and with that you could process the CLDATA
with your choice of programming language (C++ VB). I don't know of any current OTS
packages that can deal wih the CLDATA, but there's so much out there...

The CLDATA by default was created in a binary file, but there is a switch (CL read?) that
output CLDATA in an ASCII file.

(GO LEFT Line 1, Go right Line 2)