excel program generators

[kendo]

Thought I'd take the time to share something thats helped me out a lot in the last year.

I do a lot of reading on here and haven't seen anything like this. I can't write VB and at the time we didn't have any cam software and the ol' Tree machine never had macros either. So, one day while I was writing a bunch of boring code for cutting back and forth in a slot, I decided to create the excel sheet I've attached. The "slot generator" page was my first, but you can see if you check out the file that I've found a lot of uses for this trick. Now this workbook stays open half the time on my desktop.

We do a lot of probing, drilling, tapping, and countersinking hole patterns here with parts that are on fixtures and all different obstacles like clamps in the way.
Naturally, when I program these tools to only retract when they have to, it saves time in the cycle, and when theres a lot of holes it saves a lot of time.
When we first got the Haas, I wrote programs that retracted to initial plane (G98) between every hole, and found out that going back through and editing the code to remove unnecessary movement, it was very tedious and if I made a mistake, a crash could occur, a PROBE crash even.
Now I have a sheet in the workbook that spits out a complete program that will: probe the center of a frame and a ring side by side, probe the Z variance at the hole locations on the ring, drill and tap the frame, and drill and counter-sink the ring. All with the retracts being setup in the early stages of fixture design.

I couldn't write a macro this in-depth, I don't know how you'd write one to do what I'm doing, but I bet if there's a way, its a lot more complex, less flexible, and doesn't heve a nifty self-designed GUI to go with it. Or maybe you don't have macros on your machine. Most the macros I've written so far could be accomplished with an excel sheet like this. In fact, most of my macros start off as excel sheets.

So there ya go,
take my file, check it out, and start dreaming of ways you could use it or improve it.
Just shout back at me and let me know what you come up with.

[JWK42]

I can't open an XLSM file with my version of Excel. Can you save it as an Excel Worksheet.

[kendo]

as you wish...

[george4657]

I have Excel 2000 so I could not open either file as well. I did a check and found a file from Microsoft "FileFormatConverters.exe" that once run does a file conversion for these files so they open in office 2000.

This is an impressive looking set of function . You must have spent a lot of time building it.

With your skills at writing macros visual basic would be easy to learn and you would find you could do more and do it faster than with macros. For most people figuring out the logic is the problem and you show that would not be your problem.

George

[kendo]

sorry about the file problem, if saving it as 97-2003 would help anybody I'd be glad to.

Geroge, thanks for the encouragement
but where should I start?
A book?
A class?
A website?
I only speak g-code and macro b for the time being and I taught myself that in the last three years

I'd love to be writing real apps with VB, if I had some good recomendations I'd get started on it
My limited searching for info on the topic usually yields a deluge thats hard to gain any direction from since so much of the lingo is unkown to me

[tobyaxis]

Originally Posted by george4657 I have Excel 2000 so I could not open either file as well. I did a check and found a file from Microsoft "FileFormatConverters.exe" that once run does a file conversion for these files so they open in office 2000. This is an impressive looking set of function . You must have spent a lot of time building it. With your skills at writing macros visual basic would be easy to learn and you would find you could do more and do it faster than with macros. For most people figuring out the logic is the problem and you show that would not be your problem. George

You might be able to use Open Office from SunMicro to open the file, and it is FREE!

[george4657]

Kendo
To learn VB go to http://www.microsoft.com/Express/VB/
Here you can download VB Express for free as well as tutorials and sample programs.
I am amazed the Microsoft gives this away. I paid several hundred for visual studio years ago and now I use the free version of C# which is very similar to visual basic.

George

[Switcher]

Originally Posted by george4657 Kendo To learn VB go to http://www.microsoft.com/Express/VB/ Here you can download VB Express for free as well as tutorials and sample programs. I am amazed the Microsoft gives this away. I paid several hundred for visual studio years ago and now I use the free version of C# which is very similar to visual basic. George

I did the same, I bought VB.net 2003, then they started giving VB.net 2005/2008 away for free.

Oh well, I still use the 2003 editor sometimes.

[Legacy_Heirloom]

go to this site to learn excel and vb express together to write the program needed.