Displaying number of passes

[dannirr]

Morning all

Is there a way to get PathPilot to display where it is in a threading cycle - X of Y passes? Would be nice to have that below the DRO.

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[kstrauss]

Mill or lathe?
With a little editing of the gcode you could display whatever on the Status panel or, if you are not using the 4th axis, in the A-axis DRO.

[dannirr]

Lathe. Can't see how you edit the code to show it as it uses a canned cycle

[Fenichel]

The meta-solution is: don't use canned cycles. There's nothing you can do with canned cycles that can't be done better with parametric subroutines. I (with help from Ken Strauss) have been working on a set of such routines for mills, but the same principles would apply for lathes. There's no free real estate on the PathPilot screen, but it's straightforward to use the A-axis DRO -- assuming that you don't actually have A-Axis hardware -- to serve as a sort of progress bar.

The stuff I've been working on is not quite ready for prime time, but you can get its flavor from this document and this sample subroutine.

[dannirr]

The lathe PathPIlot screen has plenty of real estate available, and there are only the two DRO's for X and Z. Adding the number of passes and where you are in that cycle would be easy for them to do.

[kstrauss]

I'm curious why this information would be particularly valuable. Surely, except in the initial debugging stages, you will be letting the operation run to completion. Based on elapsed run time (I assume that is displayed in Passport lathe the same as in the mill version) or visual inspection of the thread it should be rather easy to estimate progress in production.

[dannirr]

With coolant, it's not easy to see where you are in the process. With common threads, I like to cut them to about 75% and then allow a die to do the rest - I think the result is better.

[kstrauss]

I do similar things on my manual lathe. Can't you modify the gcode to terminate after 75%?

[dannirr]

I do similar things on my manual lathe. Can't you modify the gcode to terminate after 75%?

I can specify a larger x-end in the Conversational tab to achieve it