Learning college student needs help with Post editing!

[TomShea]

Hi everybody! Well it's crunch time at my college right now and my instructor has told us he wants us to edit a POST in Mastercam. Only problem is he hasn't taught us ANYTHING about it, he wants us to figure it out on our own. Even my buddy who's had a lot of experience in other programming classes is having trouble figuring it out. I have reviewed several documents and threads, but with no avail have I been able to succesfully get the changes I need done.

I don't expect this community to tell me what to do (as this is party of my final project), but I was hoping you could atleast point me in the right direction.

What I need to do is very simple. It all revolves around the Wire POST. I need to delete the N120 G0 X0.0 Y0.0 line, Add H065 T84 C000 values to the N170 line, change the M02 in line N340 to M30 and lastly delete the % sign at the end of the generated .nc code.

I'll be honest the POST is very intimidating to me haha. Just point me in the general direction and i'll try to figure out the rest!

Thanks!
-Tom

[charger19690]

Well I also am no expert at changing posts, but...

What I normally do when trying to figure out what is going on, try opening a post and do a simple "Find" in the post.

Normally it will help you find the area of the post that generates that code. In your example, do a search for "M02". That one should be pretty easy to figure out.

The next thing, is pay no attention to the "N" numbers because they are variable line numbers that are generated during the post. They typically mean nothing in regards to how the code is generated.

Also, research the "Debugging" feature in Mastercam, this will help you figure out what lines get read by the post and what the resulting "G-Code" will be generated.

Mike in MN
www.mastercamforum.com

[Superman]

Post editing ..... take it easy, change a bit then check it
I assume it is an X family of posts ???

common character sets----miss these and it may not work
# ....is a comment, info for a post editor on what it may do
, .....is a delineater between commands
e$....is an end of line posting output
*.....before a command is to "force output of that command, even if modal ie *pfxout = force the X output


typically a post is created in sections,
-top area to define items that your machine uses ie G/Mcodes, letter addresses, G28, M60, etc
-lower area is the combinations of these addresses, moves, wcs, comments, macros and so on.
-then the outputs -arcs, lines, drill cycles, tool compensations blah, blah blah

very similar to your NC code
- the start, filename, header etc ie psof ( start of file )
- 1st tool call ie ptlchg$
- repeat operation of the same tool ie ptlchg0$
- body of program
- tool behavour at end of operation ie pretract
- end of the prog ie peof ( end of file )


a simple way to find out if you are editing in the right area may be to have the post output a defined string ( a set of character in quotes )
ie "HELLO i'm here", e$
save the post-don't close it
go into your Mcam session and post your ops, your string should appear in the output.

Do not forget that you may have to alter inside a macro like pretract instead of before or after it's call up

Any macro name is usually at the number 1 position of a line as to name it
commands within a macro are indented indicating a jump to that named macro, running it, then return to continue on to the next


Hope this is general enough for you, happy $ signing

[TomShea]

Thanks for the reply! It should give me a hand when I get back up to college tomorrow. I did some more research and am starting to understand.