Modified Post enabling Constant Surface Speed for Mill-Turning

[soofle616]

Not long ago I finished a tool holder to drop in my vise that holds two lathe tools horizontally and provides three vertical positions for either additional lathe tools or TTS holders (for drills and such). I've been using my fancy new tool holder with a fair amount of success but one thing that was driving me nuts was my inability to program using constant surface speed (g96). Pathpilot DOES allow this even on mills as verified through manual code entry through the MIDI. I've attacked this several times without success but today I finally managed to update my post processor to properly handle a tool that is set to use constant surface speed. I've attached my modified post below. There are quite a few other modifications I've made along the way including some additional allowed characters for comments (primarily the / so I can enter fractional tool sizes) and the very basic CAPABILITY_TURNING line. I think I've got a few other mods in there as well for little things that bother me from time to time. The mods to make G96 output properly were pretty extensive and I have only tested this on the machine with a single program but it seems to work just fine. Googling around for something similar I found a few threads here and there with people looking for such a thing but no one actually posting anything for fusion and/or tormach. If anyone does try this out and finds some bugs, please let me know and I will see if I can work them out.

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[soofle616]

Ran a couple real parts today using the new post. So far everything looks good. Next thing I want to try to figure out is how to invert the X axis. Programming in fusion I can make everything look right but I have to move all turning ops into a mirror pattern to flip the direction of the x axis. Of course, despite thinking about this for the last several days, it only just now occurred to me that if I flip the tool holder so my turning tools are pointing X+ instead of X- that might just solve the problem for me. I’ll have to try that out this week. In the meantime, here’s a little video from today:

[soofle616]

Found an issue with my post where coolant commands were not outputting if G96 was in effect. That has been fixed in the attached version. I'm also finding a lot of extraneous output surrounding spindle commands and such. I'm pretty sure I know what's causing that but it may take me a while to clean it up. The extra code does not appear to cause a problem, it's just redundant. As an example, when G97 is in effect, the spindle is started appropriately and then a couple lines down it is "started" again with all the same parameters.

[soofle616]

Not a lot of activity in this thread but I'm still making changes to my custom post and some of them might be of interest to the world so I'm going to continue sending them out. If I was doing things properly I would be keeping a changelog but I'm not so here's the best I can remember of all the changes I've made from the original Autodesk provided post. The complete list of changes to the actual code is substantially longer but not relevant, these are the functional changes:

Added CAPABILITY_TURNING to allow for mill-turning
Added "/" to the list of allowable comment characters (allows for outputted tool lists to properly display fractional sizes)
Added G96 Constant Surface Speed support. Very edge case scenario but for those few people mill-turning, this can be useful. Attached update fixes the previously mentioned double spindle start output
Added support for ALL available work offsets (G54-G59, G59.1-G59.3, G54.1P10 and up)
Added G0 G53 X(center) Y0 just prior to program end, after G30 to bring the table front and center. This will only output if your machine is configured in Fusion with a model number. Acceptable model numbers are 1100M, 1100M+, 1100MX, 770M, 770M+, 770MX, 440. The post will insert the appropriate value for the center of your X travel based on which machine model you have.

It has occurred to me that people may not trust the previously posted .zip files so I have included a .txt along with the .zip containing the .cps since I can't directly attach that file format here. More changes may well come with time as I continue to find things I like/dislike about how my programs are generated. In the meantime, as before, if anyone chooses to try my post and finds a bug or has a suggestion, please let me know and I will see what I can do.