Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to use iLogic in Inventor to build configurable part/work holding templates for CAM
- Learn how to specify tolerances on model parameters and use these to control targets for machined dimensions
- Learn how to use Autodesk HSM probing cycles as a QA check on a machined dimension, during the production process
- Learn how to use model and toolpath templates in Autodesk HSM to save programming time
Speaker
- GBGavin BathGavin is currently employed by NZ's largest Autodesk reseller in a split role between technical support/consulting and software development. His focus is primarily the Autodesk HSM products, and Vault. Before becoming a Technical Consultant, he spent about 10 years using Inventor, Vault and various CAM packages as a mechanical designer. Gavin has worked in a variety of industries including Aerospace, Defense, Consumer Products, and materials handling equipment for everything from logging/mining to food. In these areas he has designed machinery, equipment and products involving a huge variety of materials and manufacturing processes. Gavin places utmost emphasis on manufacturability in the design work he does, as a result of having always worked very closely with the manufacturing environment. This has taught him to adapt and calibrate his digital-prototyping tools to give real-world results.
GAVIN BATH: Thanks for all coming to this. I'm humbled by the presence of some of the people in this room who I admire and look up to. So it's really cool to be speaking in front of you. I hope it's useful what I've got to show you. And I'm really keen to talk afterwards, if you've got any questions or anything that you want to ask.
My name is Gavin Bath. If you do know me at all, you probably know me by my Instagram name rather than my real name because I know a lot of machining community are big on the Instagram scene.
Right, so if you're ready, we'll crack into it. So hopefully pictures like this get you excited. If they do, then the right people are in the room.
So I come from New Zealand. I live in a city called Christchurch. If you've heard of it, it probably would have been in 2012 when we had a series of pretty significant earthquakes. And you'll be pleased to know the city is rebounding and growing, and it's a really exciting place to live now. There are some really amazing new buildings and things going on.
So I work for a company called CADPRO Systems. We're an Autodesk reseller. And we do a lot of services-based work, a lot of consulting, training, all that kind of thing for a lot of the Autodesk products. We cover a wide variety, but we have a dedicated CAM team.
You might have seen this funny looking chap up in the top right corner. I'm like a much less famous version of him. A lot of people know Scott, so Scott Moyse and I we are part of the CAM team at CADPRO during the day. And then at night time we have a little tooling company, and we import good quality US-made tooling into New Zealand and sell it to CNC machinists all over the place.
So yeah, we get up to all sorts of fun. I've been using Inventor since release 4, so that was a long time ago now. And HSM was obviously a much more recent thing by Autodesk. But I got involved in the beta as soon as I saw it because I had experience with CAM and machining.
And so when I heard Autodesk was looking at CAM, I dived into that beta as quickly as I could and haven't looked back. I'm very passionate about the product and love using it. Like I'm sure most users, it has its issues. And we try to communicate with Autodesk back as many of those as we can and try to make it better all the time. And they're always keen to listen, so that's great.
My background was originally mechanical engineering design. I started off in the ground handling industry for airports and worked with a little startup. Built a very small design team, and we got tasked with building quite a wide range of products very quickly.
And so we had a lot of problems, as I'm sure if you've worked in rapidly changing manufacturing environment you'll know how difficult that is. But at the same time it was a great learning experience.
That company fell over and collapsed, and I went out contracting. And contracting was one of the coolest things I ever did because I got to work with all sorts of people doing all sorts of stuff in all sorts of industries. Got right into the aerospace and defense industry, mainly in Australia, and a lot of primary industry stuff.
So design was originally my background. The more of it I did, the more I decided that the real passion was the software. And so after the earthquakes, long story, but ended up at CADPRO and working with the software day-to-day, playing with the software rather than using it for real work. My customers were using it for real work.
But the nice thing about playing with it is you can do things just because you can. And you can see where it breaks and you can see what doesn't work, and then use that to inspire ideas to help customers solve their problems. So it's been a really cool thing.
In my other work life, I do some development work with .NET and Node.js. Node.js being JavaScript, I use that JavaScript knowledge I guess to do custom post processes. So we write a lot of custom post processes between Scott and myself down in New Zealand and Australia.
I must keep moving, but I run a little meet-up once a month in Christchurch for Fusion 360, and we just design and make stuff, whatever. We're printing one week, we're machining the next week, laser cutting. We get into it. So that's a really fun little group, totally noncommercial, which is nice for a change from the day job, and we just get to get to play.
And in my spare time these are the things I like to do. Right.
So really the title of this class is about configurable designs, and that's a bit of a maybe meaningless name if we don't put some context to it. So really what I'm talking about is most of us, I assume-- let's do a quick show of hands, how many of you use CAM for programming right now. So the majority of you.
So I'm guessing that where you want to spend your time is writing the program, getting it on the machine, and running it on the machine. You don't want to be messing around with building fancy models in the CAD package just to support the CAM, right? So you want to get to the point where you can do your programming as soon as possible.
And Inventor is an incredibly powerful CAD model, as you'll know, as is SolidWorks and as is Fusion 360. And you can put a lot of data in there that can really help you later on with simulation and collision detection and all that good stuff. But what I'm trying to do here is minimize the overhead and get that stuff in there as easily as possible.
So if we can make a configurable model, we're not modeling things from scratch every time. Oops, I'm going the wrong way. So this is just a little project I've been working on as an example just for this class. It's something that at some point when it's developed to where I want it we're just going to give it out to anybody that wants it.
This is not a plug for Orange Vise. I apologize, but it's one of the products that Scott and I sell, so it's the natural fit. But what I'm going to show you today you can apply to any vise you like or any workholding system really. But this is what we use, and so that's why I've chosen this.
So effectively what I'm going to do now is work backwards for a little bit. I'm going to show you the end result and show you how this works and what we can do with it. And then I'm going to take you through the steps and break it down and show you how I built it and give you some ideas for how to get started with building these kinds of models.
OK, so this is the device. You can see it's currently set up in a dual station configuration. If you're not familiar with them, we've got some CarveSmart jaws in there with Mitee-Bite Talon Grips.
So there are many, many different types of workholding systems out there. There's many types of Mitee-Bite products, there's many types of CarveSmart jaws. We want to be able to change this thing up for any job that we want to do really quickly.
So I'll show you some examples of that. I'm going to switch to the iLogic tab and bring up this little form. Now that's not a complicated thing to create. You'll see how we do it shortly.
So I might decide that I want to change it out to hard jaws. So now we've got hard jaws. You'll see that these jaws can be positioned wherever we like. We can put a part in there and constrain them into place.
I might switch back to my talon tops. Maybe I only want to use this in single station configuration because I've got a really big part. So I can hit the Single Station checkbox, and you'll see now we've got the center jaw removed. Now the front door slides and the rear jaw is locked in position. So that's how it's hit the [? buy stuff ?] for single station anyway, so I want the model to behave the same way.
I can turn that off and come back to dual station configuration. And I might change the position of the center jaw, because I might want to do a smaller part in the back and a bigger part in the front. So you'll see that the rear jaw still moves and the front jaw still moves, but I can put a bigger part in the front opening.
The talon grips are the next step. The talon grips-- if you're not familiar with these, they're basically like a little knife edge clamp that bites into your stock. And they leave a very small carrier on the bottom which is easy to machine off in your second op when you flip the part.
So depending on what we're doing here, these grips need to be positioned to suit the size of the stock that we're working with. So if I just move to the rear station for a second, just say, for example, we don't want to use the left-hand end for the stop. We want to put the stop up against the right-hand end.
You'll see that I've put in these little codes for jaw A, B, C, and D, which is just the jaws moving from front to back. So if I go down to jaw D, you'll notice that the left-most letter there is an R, which stands for a right-hand talon stop. Let's just say I want a left-hand stop on the other end-- I'll just change that R to a B, which is blank. And when I hit Enter, you'll see the little grip disappear.
Now I'll come down the other end, change that to an L and hit Enter, and you'll see the stop pops up here. Maybe we want another grip somewhere in the middle, then I could just go and find the position and put a G and a new grip pops into place.
So quite quick to put those where you want them. It's nice to have them there so that when I forget or I'm not thinking what I'm doing, I'll see that collision in the CAM simulation.
So from that point on, I mean, you can take this as far as you like, right? You can put whatever options you want in there. That I guess is the whole beauty of configurable-- you make it do what you want to do using the same types of techniques.
Where I've taken it from here is that now we might want to start dealing with the stock itself. So I'm going to use the Place iLogic component and pick this. You can think of it as a template assembly. So I'm picking this assembly here.
The difference between Place iLogic component and normal Place and Inventor is that as soon as I do that, it creates a copy in the background. So this is a unique instance of the stock just for this part that I'm going to machine. So when I click OK now-- I'll just maximize this window-- you'll notice that the stock is sitting in blue, and it's automatically tried to snap it into one of the positions.
I can use the left and right arrows on the keyboard to choose where I want to place that. So that's using a technology in Inventor called iMates. And I'm not as hot on the CAD side of SolidWorks as I am with Inventor, but I believe there's an equivalent in SolidWorks to iMates, which are pre-configured connections between components. So they're very easy to set up and author.
But as soon as I've got it in the station that I want, I just hit Enter, and now it's trying to pick the other side. So if I do the same thing again, that's now going to try and fasten it to the rear jaw.
So because that's pre-designed, I don't have to figure out how much that little knife edge needs to bite into the stock. It's all figured out for me, and that stock is now positioned in place.
It's trying to place the second one. Sorry, bear with me.
So you can see it can slide, but it can't move forwards and backwards. So all I have to do now is just constrain the end of it to the end of the stop. So that's now in place.
Now you might have noticed when I placed that, the file that I placed was an assembly, not a part file. The reason I've done that is I like to model the stock most of the time. Sometimes if I'm doing a quick job, I'll use the stock definition inside the CAM. But most of the time I like to model the stock, and then in my CAM definition use stock from solid and pick the stock that I want. It gives me more flexibility for doing second or third operations and being able to show you the stock in different forms, I suppose.
I'm sure Autodesk is developing the stock to be able to track history as it goes down the path, which might make all of this redundant. Maybe all of it, but at least the stock side. But in the meantime, this is how I work.
But if I open that assembly up, the reason I've done it this way is I can now go and place my part into this assembly. And rather than just placing it anywhere and then constraining it into place, if I right-click and say place grounded at origin, it will lock the origin of the part to the origin of the stock assembly.
And now I have another iLogic form with some offsets in it that allows me to basically position the stock relative to the part. So I can use these little sliders. And then later if I decide that the part is not quite in the right place, I can quickly make some tweaks and adjustments.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the most efficient. I mean, you might be quicker at putting some constraints in there. I guess this is really more of an example of how you might want to use it. You'll see that I can still type numbers in here.
And let's just adjust the [? x. ?] I'm making this look really hard because I'm using the math on a table cloth and it's jumping. That's going to do for now. We'll just bring it back in the Y.
So if I hit Save, I've now got stock and part in one assembly. And when I update the model in the assembly, that's now all locked into place and positioned. But at any point if I want to make an adjustment, I can just then place it at that component
Now if it crashes on me, I'm going to be really upset because since we're aiming to advance to 2018 I've had very, very good stability. But for whatever reason last night, it just started crashing on me when I tried doing an in-place edit like that. So we'll just pretend it didn't happen.
AUDIENCE: It's live.
GAVIN BATH: What's that?
AUDIENCE: It only happens when--
GAVIN BATH: When it's live-- yeah, exactly, exactly.
While this restarts, are there any questions so far? Is this pace OK?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
GAVIN BATH: So all I was going to say at that point before I move on to the next step is that during my tool plotting process if I decide, ah, actually it would be nice to have the parts sitting just a little bit further up, I don't have to go and find a parameter and figure out the offset and make a change numerically, I can just double-click on the part, open up the iLogic form, drag a slider, and hit OK, and regenerate and carry on.
So it is quite a nice way to work. I'll just reload the model.
So the next example following on from that is if we wanted to use soft jaws. Now soft jaws by their nature are suited to that particular job. It's not a generic thing, it's something that's specific to that job.
So I want to be able to place a new one quickly that's a copy, that's not one I've used before. And I just want it to be in the right place. So I've used those iMates again. You can see in soft jaw mode all it does is just removes all the slave jaws, if you like.
If I go back to that Place iLogic component and find my soft jaw template, if you like, you'll see once again the blue representation, if I click OK there. And once again with the left and right arrow keys you'll see that I just need to press that until I get it into the position that I want it.
So if I want to use that [? ridge ?] for example, I hit Enter. That's locked into place, all three dimensions. So it won't move, so that's fixed.
Now one thing that I end up doing quite often is machining a precise corner for probing. And when probing for a zed surface, you can now tell it to use the point that you clicked. But if you want to be precise about it, all I've done is split that top face. So if I select that face rather than the whole top face, the default probe point is going to be the center of that circle, not the center of the top face of the jaw.
So it's just something that I use. But being a templated operation, if I need to generate the code for that-- ah, it's going to crash again because I did it again. I think this is a new bug.
Just so your aware, if I do an in-place edit on a part in an assembly and the CAM tab is loaded, I presume it's trying to load the CAM information. But it doesn't support that in assembly, and it crashes. So I need to report that to development. But I only discovered it last night, so I apologize for doing that again.
Hey, it didn't crash, it's OK. Sorry, ignore that.
So where I was going with that is if I open the part, because it's the templated part, my setup and CAM for that soft jaw corner are already there. So rather than saving a [? InC ?] file, the tool parts are just stored in case I make changes to it first.
So that's the examples I'm going to use. And now we're getting get into the how rather. That's the end goal, I suppose. Hopefully, that's enough for you to see the scope. You might be able to start exploring and understand that this is far from a finished vise that does everything. It's just a starting point.
Any questions at that point?
So if you've used Inventor for any time, you'll be familiar with the concepts of parameters and iProperties. If you're not, the parameters are basically the dimensional information that controls the geometry. And iProperties are metadata associated with that Inventor file.
So parameters might store things like the length or the width or the thickness of a part, whereas iProperties might store things like the material or the author, the designer, maybe the machinist's name, the revision number, all that associated information.
So I'm a big data management guy, I love Vault. It bores most people to tears, but putting all of this stuff in Vault and then being able to search for programs based on iProperties, they're in parts, all that stuff gets me excited. That's a topic for another class.
But the point I'm trying to make here is that iProperties and parameters by default can only be controlled through the parameters dialog and the iProperties dialog. And they're an OK first point of call, but for that nice configurable view that you saw with the iLogic form, that's where you need iLogic. iLogic allows you to present iProperties and parameters in a different way, but it also allows you to do stuff in the background to make decisions and logical rules about how those parameters and properties should behave.
So you can think of anything you like. You could say if the width goes over a certain length, turn this part red so that the designer knows that that's not going to fit in the machine. I mean, whatever-- you name it, you can probably link stuff together to do it.
And you can even then start to get Inventor files to talk to external systems. So we've built little DLLs, little libraries that you can plug into Inventor. Very easy to do-- you literally go and specify it in the Options dialog. And that's something, if you want it, I'll give it to you. It's just a little library that basically allows you to get iLogic to talk to a SQL database, or this functionality built into native iLogic that lets you talk to Excel spreadsheets.
So you might want to maybe use an ERP system or Excel for your job tracking, and you might want to pull that data directly into your Inventor files for tracking. Imagine a job number and some stock information about the stock that that part is machined from.
In Inventor, you might bring up an iLogic form, type in the job number, and the stock information gets loaded automatically. So start to think outside modeling and CAM and what might be able to be connected to improve your workflows. And that will give you some ideas for where you might use this.
So the next thing we're going to do is just go into another live demo. Hopefully you like live demos because this class is just about all live demos. All right, so we're going to say bye to the vise, and we're going to start with a brand new blank part inside Inventor.
So all I'm going to do here-- really basic-- is just start with a rectangle. And once I click OK, these things are going to become parameters, so I'm going to specify the parameter names on the fly. I'm just going to say width equals 150, hit the Tab key. And length equals 200, hit Enter. I'll extrude that up by height equal to 50.
So hopefully that's all really straightforward. If we go into the parameters dialog, this is the database in the background that controls the dimensions of that part, right? And you can see here, we have width, length, and height. And over here they're the numbers that I typed in.
I'm going to add a slightly different type of parameter now, which is a true or false parameter. So this thing that I'm adding here is called a user parameter. This is one that's not directly tied to the model yet, it's just a placeholder for something I'm to do later.
And I'm going to call this one hole on. That's just a little convention that people use where basically hole on can only mean one thing now. If it's true, it means the hole is there. And if it's false, the hole is not there.
So what we're going to do next is we're going to create a hole and we're going to tick a tick box and untick a tick box, and you'll see the hole disappear and reappear. And this is the foundational building block for iLogic. So right now if I change that from true to false, nothing happens, because it's not wired up to anything.
I'm just going to put the hole in the center of this part. And I'll give it a diameter of 50. And we'll tell it we want to go all the way through.
So if you've never used iLogic before, your iLogic browser probably isn't visible. So you can see that I have the iLogic tab available. If you don't, you just go to the Manage tab and you turn on the iLogic browser with that button there. And then it will appear over here.
Once you have that in place, you'll see that there are four tabs-- Rules, Forms, Global Forms, and External Rules. That sounds twice as complicated as it is.
Global forms are just forms that are stored outside the Inventor model. And external rules are just rules that are stored outside the Inventor model. The other two are obviously embedded. So if you've learned rules and forms, you already know how to use global forms and external rules. So don't worry about that.
So what I'm going to do is right click in the form space and say Add a Form. And this is a nice, friendly user interface. You can see a preview of what my form is going to look like up here. There's an area here to chuck all the stuff that I want on my form. And there's an area here that's all the stuff that I've got access to. Don't worry about the stuff down at the bottom just at the moment.
So all I need to do now is grab my width, my length, and my height. I'm going to put the diameter in there as well, and also that new hole on parameter that we created before. And you can see that just dragging and dropping them in there, it's now put those on the form for me.
So in its very simplest form-- ah, that was a terrible pun, and that actually was unintentional. I can't think of a synonym for form. In its simplest whatever, all this allows me to do is open up that form and control the parameters in a different way.
Now why I show this example? A thing to think about here is if you're not working in a one-person design team, if you're working with others and you know how that model works but they don't, rather than give them giving them a model with 150 parameters and them having to try and figure out which one drives what, just do what I just did. It takes 30 seconds they can see straight away the parameters that need to control that model.
So it's very easy for someone else to pick this up and go, oh, I want to change the width. Make it 125, and the model changes.
So we're not really doing anything that sophisticated here. It's just the parameters that you would usually access through the parameters dialog up there presented in a nicer way. And that's all there is thought iLogic forms.
There's a lot more functionality to make that form behave differently. I can say, well, I don't want to hole on to be some clunky dropdown list. I just want it to be a tick box.
So I select it, I come down into the Properties. And I'll change it from a true or false to a checkbox. And you see straight away it changes to a checkbox. So it's really just UI, right? It's just a way of presenting that information to whoever is using this form.
Another one we might do is select the width. And we might only have stock sizes or we don't want the poor chap using the band saw to have to cut to 127.3, we might just want to do 5 mill increments. If it's five mill over, it's one extra pass, whatever scenario you might have.
So instead of having a tick box that allows me to type in any number I like, I might change that to a slider and change the slider properties to say that the smallest width is 100, the widest we can handle is 200, but the step size is five millimeters. So if I open up my form this time, I can drag the slider to change the width, but you'll notice that wherever I let it go it's always an increment of five millimeters.
And I forgot to apologize at the start, everything here is metric because that's what I use. So I don't have a converter for-- is it cranberries per [? four ?] furlong. I can't remember the units here. Inventor, if you're not aware, if you ever need to deal in metric units, you can just type the dimension in millimeters and Inventor will figure it out for you. So you can work with any unit.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] slider when you set it up like that, and you said earlier you can also type in the value.
GAVIN BATH: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Do you type in non-values [INAUDIBLE]?
GAVIN BATH: You can. So there's no way to lock it down. But if you think about it slightly differently, if somebody really wants to abuse the system, they'll just go into the parameters, [INAUDIBLE] make it anything anyway. So it's really to make it hard to get the wrong value, I suppose, yeah?
Sure.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I know you'll get into that, but is there a way to set up rules so that if someone does go between your increments.
GAVIN BATH: Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Absolutely. And one of the things that we do with our customers all the time with rules is try to enforce company standards. So if somebody tries to save a model but they haven't entered the job number, then you get an error message. And it says, you can't save this file until you've entered a job number. Straight away it pops up a form for them to enter the job number, they hit OK, and it's done. So they don't even have to go and find the iLogic form. You can control all of that with iLogic.
So the rules are incredibly flexible. You can do all sorts of stuff.
AUDIENCE: Can you set it up for foreign offsets to show [INAUDIBLE] so that you [INAUDIBLE] generate [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: I don't know off the top of my head. I'll show you where you go to look. So the thing that controls when the rules run, and the rules can launch forms, are things called iLogic triggers, event triggers. So there's this little thing up here called event triggers.
Now I can't remember if there's one for on/open. There's one for new document. So when you create a new document, it prompts you to enter some stuff.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: After open. Sorry, I didn't even see that. But yeah, thanks for spotting that. So yes, yes, the answer is yes.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to switch gears, go to Rules, and explain how we use Rules in this context. And we're going to keep moving through it about this pace. If we get to the end and we still got time, we can come back and do any of this in more detail, if you want to. So hopefully that's enough of an introduction to a form and how you start to create it.
But you'll notice that even though I've wired that up-- sorry, two seconds, I'll come to you in a second-- even though I've wired this checkbox up to the form and the parameter in the parameters dialog, you'll remember that we didn't do anything with that parameter. So if untick at the moment, it's not doing anything, that's what we're going to do with a rule, we're going to wire that up so that the hole disappears.
Sorry, question?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Why it's not doing anything?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
GAVIN BATH: Yeah, OK.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Sure.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: I don't think you can. Because it's embedded in the Inventor part file, you can save the part file as a template. So I guess in a way the form can be saved in the part and you could copy the part and then change the template there. Oh, this copy form, you can maybe copy and paste it into another part? So you just have maybe a series of parts with the forms that you want, and then when you need to use them you copy them across? I haven't actually tried that. You'll have to.
AUDIENCE: I was just thinking it would help to [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: Right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Maybe [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Yeah, OK.
AUDIENCE: Global form? Is that where a global form would come in?
GAVIN BATH: Global forms? So the way the way global forms work is I can type this form or one like it and I can save it in an external file. And then it will operate on any part or model or drawing or whatever that I create. So this one is working with the parameters of the file that it's embedded in.
A global form using rules can be set up to work with the parameters of any model that's open at the time. So you can have one form for things like job information, job number, the sale that you're running that job on, whatever. You could put all of that into a standardized form that shows up for every part file, if you wanted to.
OK, so you saw me earlier right click and say Add Form. This time I'm going to right click in the Rules window and say Add Rule. So I'm going to call this hole suppression. Does anyone want me to explain what suppression is in terms of suppressing a feature in an Inventor model?
So what we're wanting to do here is we're wanting to suppress that hole and unsuppress it on demand. If it's suppressed, it's unloaded from memory, Inventor is not thinking about it, and we can treat the model as if it's not there.
So this is usually the point with iLogic where people start to get a little bit nervous because what about I'm about to do is start typing some code. And code is a really scary word for a lot of people, unless it's G-code in the world we work in.
But what iLogic does a really good job of is making code as simple as possible for people who aren't programmers. So bear with me, bear with me. It's not as scary as it looks.
So down the side here we have a series of what are called code snippets. And these are all pre-built functions to do interesting stuff. Well, you don't need to know the code to do it because it's there for you.
So the one that we're going to be working on in a minute is a type of feature. It's a hole feature-- you can see the hole sitting there in the little browser here. And so a good guess is that the snippet that I'm looking for is going to be in the Features area.
And you'll see here there's a list of all different things you can do-- changing threads and setting colors and doing all sorts of stuff. Actually, why is color? That's interesting that color is under Features, but anyway.
Is active-- I've got a bone to pick with Autodesk. I need to chase them up on this. I don't think it should be called is active-- I think it should be called is suppressed or is not suppressed or something like that, because active is not something that we use. That terminology doesn't fit anywhere else in Inventor. But that's just one that you need to remember. Is active is the same as is not suppressed, all right?
Just before I double click it, this window here is where we type our code. And the code is a program, just like a G-code. Or [? Heidenhein, ?] just like an NC file, it gets read from top to bottom. And it will run any time Inventor tells it to run. So those event triggers allow us to control when it runs or when it doesn't run.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to double click that as active and see what we get. And the idea here is that this should give you a clue now of what you need to do. So it says Feature.IsActive. Yeah, that's some computer language for something to do with feature, but here it says feature name. So that's a good hint that that's where it wants the name of the feature.
So I'll come up here and select the feature that I want to work with. And you'll see here there's a tab for Names. So there's the name of that feature. So all I do is get rid of everything between the quotes and double click this, and now this will tell Inventor to do something to that hole feature.
I'm just putting an equal sign there. And if I put a zero or type false-- or I think you can even use things like on or off, or there's a number of them that work. I usually use zero and one, so zero is obviously false.
All I've done now is said, set the activity state of that hole feature to zero. So turn it off. And you'll see when I hit Save and Run, the hole disappears.
Now obviously this is still not going to do anything because we haven't told it to do anything with that parameter yet. All we've done is force the hole to turn off.
So we'll go back in here, and there's one extra little thing that we need to use now, which is a thing called an if statement. So if something, do something.
These are also pre-built for you. You can see the format over here-- if, then, end if. So if I click on that, it will show me. This is what in the programming we call syntax. This has to be formatted in a certain way for the thing to work.
And the clue is my expression. So the expression I want is something to do with a parameter. So I go and find my parameter under User Parameters. And you can see there hole on.
So if hole on equals true, then do something. And all I have to do is grab this and cut and paste it into here. This time I'm going to use true. So if the hole on parameter in the parameter style my form is true, then that feature is going to be active.
And then all I have to do is do the reverse state, which is else false. Yes, it's a different language to G-code, but most of you are familiar with G-code, I'm sure. It's just about learning, right? That's hopefully nothing too scary.
So I've hit Save and Run now. Now one thing-- you need to go and look at the documentation to know is that even though I don't have any event triggers set up for my rules, by default Inventor will watch for any property or parameter change, and any time that parameter changes it will automatically run the rule.
So it's like it's constantly watching to see if the model is changing. And if the model changes, it'll run any rules you can stop it from doing that if you want to, but it helps us in this case. So if I go onto my form now and tick the box, you see that hole comes back. We untick the box and the hole disappears.
So that's the building blocks-- you start with that process. And now if you imagine back to the vise, it's just a series of those rules and forms, or one form in a series of rules that's just turning on those little talon grips, turning them off, turning on the soft jaws, turning them off. We're working with things more than features, we're working with constraints, dimensions to change the positions of the jaws, all that thing.
So that's the end of the iLogic section. And it's designed to be an intro so that you've got enough to get started and so to start having a look. Before we look at templates, which is the next thing, are there any questions on that? No? OK.
So you'll remember when I placed the soft jaw and also the stock into the talon grips, I mentioned templates. Now if you've only used CAM templates, the templates I'm talking about here are a totally different kind of template-- we're talking about Inventor model templates here.
But basically it's things that we can use to speed up the creation of new unique instances. So that's actually a terrible slide because none of those look like unique instances. I don't know why I put that there, but anyway. So we're going to dive back into Inventor and go through template creation.
So is everyone familiar with CAM templates? Has everybody used CAM templates? So we're going to look at CAM templates in a minute.
The first ones I want to show you before that though are model templates. So these aren't templates in the traditional Inventor sense.
Why is that not switching over? Sorry, bear with me. Templates in the traditional sense are the files that show up when you click the New button up at the top in here.
Now by default these will be for completely blank parts, assemblies and drawings, and presentations, various file formats. There's nothing to stop you from taking something like that Orange vice model and saving a version of it into here as a template. And any time you want to do a job with the vise, you hit New and you hit Vice Model and you'll get a brand new instance of that assembly.
The thing to be aware of there is that usually that causes issues. You can't take a complete model of this [? leg ?] turn with all its individual parts and drawings and everything and just create a copy of the assembly itself and then make changes and expect everything to survive because Inventor has complex relationships between all the parts and subassemblies and assemblies and things like that.
In the vice model, however, all of the components are completely standard components that we don't touch, except for the soft jaws and the stock. I mean, the standard steel jaws, the Mitee-Bite products, the hard jaws themself, the base of the vise. None of that we're editing.
So what that means is that any new assembly we create which might have a different configuration, different jaw positions, different setups for positioning of the clamps or whatever it might be, any new one we create is only making changes at the assembly level. So the only file we need to copy is the assembly. And all of the 20 different jobs that we do in the next week are all still referencing the same standard parts.
So you don't end up with a cluttered hard drive with hundreds of copies of the same vice jaw. It's all standard parts being used by unique instances of the assembly. And so that's why you can quite comfortably put your assembly in here, and when you create a new one know that that's going to be a unique instance for that job. So it's quite an easy way to then create new jobs.
The other types of templates I showed though were using that Place iLogic Component button. Now most people have never used Place iLogic Component will have no idea what that button does because they're used to using the Place button in Inventor, or maybe the Place from Content Center.
Now the magic of the Place iLogic Component button is what it does is it takes any model that might have iLogic rules and forms. And when you place it, it creates a copy in the background. So that it's a unique instance. And then it allows you to set the parameters on the fly.
So you can have something that's got smart rules and knows how to adjust itself to a particular scenario, and you create a unique instance on the fly and chuck it into your assembly. So that's not a traditional Inventor template, that's just iLogic model that's being used like a template.
So all I've done for the software jaw here is created well, first of all, the geometry. In fact, I think I've punched this from CarveSmart. Actually, I think Scott might have modelled that one. Anyway, doesn't matter.
Start with a basic model, add whatever standard features you want, maybe the corner. I obviously don't want to stop machining the shape of my part into this because then it's not going to be unique anymore. Then every templated part is going to have the same job. But I can put the setup for the CAM and the operations all into that template part so that it'll appear every time.
The other end of that work flow-- we'll just go back to soft jaws. Now I want to go on through that too quickly. So from this list here we're talking about the bottom option there-- Place iLogic Component.
And notice that this file-- that's a horrible name-- but one by 1.7, [? 1.6LESoftJaw.ipt. ?] The bit that I just want you to take a note of is the .ipt. There's no dash or number in front of that.
So think of this part, the one that I just had opened a minute ago, think of this as your template. When I go Open, the first thing it does is in the background-- and this is why it takes a few seconds-- it's creating a copy of that. It loads it up so you can preview it. So now we can see the part that we're placing, and I can actually change these parameters of the one I'm going to place on the fly, if I want to.
You'll notice that that says free at the moment. But I can even tie that to an assembly parameter. So you could even extend this by having your vise have controls for the stock by just controlling these empty parameters that do nothing.
But when you place the soft jaw, you just wire this up to the stock parameters. And then your iLogic form for the vise will also control your stock. I haven't done it in this example, but it's just another thing to think about.
So when I click OK, once again we get this nice functionality-- it's going to wake up, come on-- where we can choose our position. And when I hit Enter and save this assembly, you'll see now if I go and repeat the process and go up a couple of levels, you'll notice here that I've got -01.ipt and -02.ipt.
So those numbers are the files that it's created automatically. So you might need to massage that a bit to get it giving you the names you want and putting them in the right places, but that's the gist of it. It's creating those unique instances for us.
If I go and make a change to this, no surprise is what's going to happen here. If I go and cut something out of this jaw and save it, if we go and place our next one-- oops. I'm sure it's pretty obvious, but the new one that comes through is not going to have that cut-out in it because it's creating it again from the template. So the one that we edited was a unique instance.
So there's our next one with no cut-out. Does that makes sense? All right.
So the next thing is I'm going to go through CAM templates briefly now. And then it's going to get tied back together when we start looking at probing in a minute.
So just say, for example, I'm not going to spend any time on these toolbars. I'm going to use the bare minimum picks and clicks that I can just to get some toolbars generated. What do I want? [? To ?] interface my [? own. ?] And let's do a 3D adaptive.
Now say I produce hundreds and hundreds of these parts, but they're not all identical, some are slightly longer, slightly shorter, different diameter holes, whatever, whatever, whatever. It would be nice if I didn't have to repeat that whole process I did every single time.
So what you can do is you can pick one or more operations in the CAM and you can right click and you can store as template. You can give it a name. I do need to follow that through, store as template. Let's call this AU2017 And now I'll go and delete those two parts. So pretend we're starting with a new part now.
I can just right click the Set Up and say Create From Template, and you'll see I've got a whole lot of pre-saved templates here. One of them called AU2017. You can see it has two operations in it. It's got face and adaptive.
But the button at the top is Create All Templates, which is basically create a fresh copy of all of them. Now all I need to do is update them to suit the new geometry. So I can just, in this case, hit Generate, and it'll generate them. So just remember that for later because we're going to come back to that in a minute.
So now we're going to change topic again. That's the end of the template section. I think we'll have time for a couple of quick questions, if there are any, on templates.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: OK, hopefully they're place, and why you would use them is there.
The next thing we're going to talk about is in-cycle probing. So this is using a probing system on a machine control to do some QA or CMM-type work during the process. Some of you might have been on the Autodesk HSM FastTrack webinar a few months ago that Scott Moyse and I did where we demonstrated this process.
But I know it's work that Tim has been doing himself. And I'm not pretending this is anything original here-- it's more just about showing how. So really what we we're talking about should be captured in this video.
We've roughed the part already, we're coming down with a finishing tool and we're finishing the bore to a certain diameter. We might have some straight chips hanging around in the hole. So this tool has got [? three-tool ?] air, so we're just going to blow the chips out. And then unfortunately the purge drops all of the water back in the hole, but what can you do.
And you come back with the probe. It'd be nice if this was a bit faster.
Now what you don't see that's happening here is it's now currently resetting the wear compensation for that tool and the control. It's taking the measured value that the Renishaw system picked up, comparing to the target, and adjusting the wear compensation to the difference, and then it'll come back and re-machine.
So that's all driven from the CAM. But it's relying on the fact that the machine control has the macros to be able to support that, I suppose. And so effectively it's done its own measurement check, and then re-machine to within spec.
AUDIENCE: How many people are using probing now in their machining? Anybody? Because you said [INAUDIBLE] locate the parts? Or do you [INAUDIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: Always location [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Later, later.
GAVIN BATH: Because I'm going to show you how to do that now in the CAM. And the one caveat here is that the post needs to support it. I don't know if you guys have got plans to put that into the post by default?
AUDIENCE: Get a hold of Gavin, the consulting work [INAUDIBLE]. It's definitely something where [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: OK, great. So we've written posts for some of our customers to do this, but the knowledge is out there. You just have to find the people to help you with it if you want to do it.
So one thing-- probing is currently supported in Inventor HSM and Fusion 360. Not yet in HSM Works, or is it there now?
AUDIENCE: It's maybe a few weeks.
GAVIN BATH: OK, so it's coming in HSM Works.
AUDIENCE: It's been out for a few weeks.
GAVIN BATH: Oh, it's been out for a few weeks. Sorry, I've been very much in Inventor land for the last few weeks, getting ready for this.
So the default state for probing is that it's used for finding out where the corner of your stock is. So you can get the machine roughly close, and then you can set your work coordinate system to a precise corner without having to touch it off yourself manually. That's the gist of it.
What we're doing here is we're just using it. But rather than setting the G54 to the position that the probe picks up on, for example, we're just using it to measure a bore. And that's one of the things that some of the probing systems support.
I believe the Datron system supports it. Renishaw, they support it. There are other ones out there, but that's the concept.
So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to use the WCS Probe, which I hope will be renamed just Probe, because it's not just for WCS.
AUDIENCE: So that's specifically called WCS Probe, but right now it's only for work shifting your--
GAVIN BATH: Coordinate system, OK, OK.
AUDIENCE: So you will see like an inspection or another name pop up.
GAVIN BATH: Awesome.
AUDIENCE: It was specifically named this because they wanted to set the expectation of [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: Right, OK, that's good to know.
So if I use this WCS Probe operation and pick my probe from my tool library-- that's a two millimeter probe, I've never seen one of those. I meant to pick six.
We can do all sorts of things in here, but really the key step here is that I need to pick that bore. Now by default what that's going to try and do is whichever coordinate system we're using for this program, it's going to reset the origin to the center of that bore. That's one of the Renishaw-- or one of the probing routines that's supported on the control.
So what we've done at the moment, until it's supported natively, is all we do is once we've created that probing cycle, we go into Edit Notes and we type CMM-- it's just a code that we used-- and click OK. And now when that operation gets posted, the post processor knows that if it sees CMM for a probing operation, it mustn't touch the work coordinate system, it must just use another part of the post which runs the Renishaw macros for resetting the tool comp, the wear comp.
So obviously that is just one operation. And really we need a series of things. You would remember that it first finished the bore, then it did the blow dry, then it probed it, and then it re-machined the ball.
This is where I mentioned templates would come in. So what we're going to do here is just right click Create From Template, I got to my CMM Operation, and say, Create All Templates. You'll see I've now got a Bore Finish, Remove Coolant, Wear Compress it, WCS Probe, and Bore Tolerance.
So I do need to update the geometry because these new tool parts don't know where my bore is. So I'm going to double click that one and pick that edge. Going to double click this one and pick that edge.
This one here is just a manual NC. If you haven't used manual NC, it's just a way of injecting code, a specific block of code for the post-- sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, not for the post, for the control-- a way of injecting it at a certain point in your program.
So I'm using the pass-through type, which means don't do anything with it in the post, just send it straight onto the control. And the code I'm using here, #2614 equals 0. #2614, if you use a Haas control, that 2,600 range is where it stores the wear comp for the tools. So all we're doing is we're finding wear comp value 14 and setting it to zero at that point in the program.
Then we run our probe cycle, so I need to update that geometry. And then we tolerance that same contour.
So that's all there is to it. That's all the operations. And that will work on any circular bore by just repeating that process.
Create from template, update the geometry, regenerate the tool part, and it's done. I'm going to generate the code now so I can show you what that looks like in the NC file. But just bear in mind that this has been set up for checking a bore.
If you wanted it to check the width of a part, you'd have to design your own process to do that. This is not a one-stop shop to do any CMM work you ever want to do again. It's purely an example. So I'll post that out. I'm going to use my Haas UMC 750 post, which is enabled with the probing stuff. And we'll save that.
This is just a little tip-- if you hold Control-Shift and right click in the browser, you can open the NC folder because mine doesn't open the editor automatically.
So you can see the program here now, our finishing operation. We come up a bit in the zed and then blow the coolant out. And this is the key line. Oh, oh, oh, I don't like that hourglass. Oh, that's all right.
This is the line here, #2614 equals 0. So that's what you saw from the manual NC. So at that point after removing the coolant we're going to reset the wear comp and the control. We select that probe, come down, probe the bore.
The difference you'll note here from the default work order system cycle, that P9 at 14, you'll notice it's got a D value and a T value for the tool that we want to set. So that's one of the functions in, I believe that's Inspection Plus, one of the functions in the Renishaw system that it recognizes to do exactly what we're talking about. And there are other ones as well-- you just need to find the right one and wire it up, basically.
And then we come back and we finish the bore with the new wear compact activated, and then testing when we were playing around with that. Maybe afterwards I'll ask openly the question at the time of what his results have been. But when we've been testing that at home, unless you're talking ultra fine tolerances-- I mean, if you're within the range that Renishaw quote, we've been getting really good results with that, and perfectly acceptable for most jobs.
This leads me on to the next thing, which is now we're starting to talk about precision. And just before I talk about precision, if there's questions on that, go for it. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I have a quick question. Going back to the phrasing of the [INAUDIBLE] female [INAUDIBLE] female [INAUDIBLE] templating CAM where we bring in similar processes.
GAVIN BATH: Yes.
AUDIENCE: The probing routines.
GAVIN BATH: Right.
AUDIENCE: Blowing the air, recheck when you're rematching it. Is there a way with the probing development that we could have that template process leverage the tool path prior to [? refuse ?] the [INAUDIBLE] to regenerate that [INAUDIBLE]?
GAVIN BATH: So this will be a better question for the Autodesk guys, but my understanding is that the limitation is that this CAM is not feature-based. It doesn't analyze the model and decide what types of tool path to apply. So with a tool path, especially the 2D stuff, you're being prescriptive about what you wanted to machine.
So I'm guessing here, but I think to do what you're talking about, they would have to turn the 2D stuff into modeller ware CAM that can analyze the geometry and try to make decisions for itself. But I don't believe the 2D has that capability.
Am on the right track there?
AUDIENCE: [? No. ?]
GAVIN BATH: OK.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
GAVIN BATH: So maybe with 3D, like with 3D there's definitely a lot less selection. Templates will--
AUDIENCE: It's not selection-based. But that's [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: Anytime you've got touch surfaces or boundaries or entry points or anything that you have to tell it where to put it. I mean, I guess maybe potentially in the future they could figure out better ways of tracking geometry. So they could say, hey, there was a point that was in this region that looked like this, and it doesn't exist anymore. Could that be it?
So maybe machine learning. I mean, we probably talking--
AUDIENCE: But we're thinking they know that the 2D tool paths that [INAUDIBLE] select its geometry [? and guide it. ?] So when we called in that probing macro or probing template.
GAVIN BATH: Yes.
AUDIENCE: We're basically redefining that 2D contour, you go back and you re-machine it.
GAVIN BATH: You are, but--
AUDIENCE: That probing tool path did not look at previous. So I think--
GAVIN BATH: Oh, I see what you're saying. So you pick the first contour and you want all the other tool paths to use the same contour.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
GAVIN BATH: That's a really great suggestion. I don't know if that can be done.
AUDIENCE: And then that's just going to reduce those four steps right there.
GAVIN BATH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if all you templated operations are related to the same geometry, like a shared selections.
AUDIENCE: If you're calling that, probing [INAUDIBLE] based off of your previous selection. [INAUDIBLE] tool path [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: That's a really cool idea. Give them an idea station before anyone else does. I'll vote for it.
AUDIENCE: But that's actually a good point. Put it in the advanced station. If anybody doesn't know about that, it gets a lot of visibility [INAUDIBLE] the product. [INAUDIBLE] pretty deep conversations about [? shared ?] selections.
GAVIN BATH: Cool, cool. That sounds great. OK.
AUDIENCE: Oh, so the other thing I was going to say-- sorry to jump in on you, Gavin. So what you're doing is it's a big-brained [? tech ?] thing, right? So not big-brained, [INAUDIBLE]. So [INAUDIBLE] all the functionality just shows this [INAUDIBLE] we're working on, just making part of the [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: So you'll automate everything I'm doing and make me redundant. I get it. No, no, no, I'm joking.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: And I guess that goes back to my point before where I get to play with this stuff. I don't have a production schedule to meet. So I'm doing this stuff for fun and to see what's possible, and then talking to people like yourselves.
You go, hey, could I use that to do this. And then we figure out an actual practical workflow exactly for that problem. So as long as you guys keep turning this stuff into automated stuff in CAM, we'll just be looking for more new things. And that's kind of--
AUDIENCE: It's your job, it's what you do, [INAUDIBLE] do the next [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: Right, right. So I'm always really keen to hear any feedback, suggestions, questions, because that's what keeps us going.
All right, so we're starting to talk about precision-- probing, getting it accurate. So let's talk about tolerancing.
When this all came together, this got me really excited because it uses an element of Inventor that I've never understood why it exists. There's other people in the room-- I'm looking at one in particular. He knows Inventor inside-out, and I'd love to hear his ideas about why this might have been here before CAM. But now that CAM exists, it's like a match made in heaven. It's really cool.
So what we're going to look at, we're going to go back to a live demo. So you'll remember that I put a 15 millimeter bore through the center of this part.
Now in designer land where I used to work, I could make that 50.000 and not have to think about it anymore, and it's somebody else's problem. I didn't really appreciate that, like a lot of designers don't until I worked on the other side. It's like, what is this guy doing, how on earth am I going to make this. So I get that, I understand both sides.
So what I'm trying to do here is try to make it easier for a designer to specify things in a way that makes it easier for the CAM operator. It's not going to stop people putting ridiculous tolerances on things that don't need to be that fine, but just a different way of working with it.
So in the designer land, that can be 50.000 because it's a digital model. It can be anything we like. And Inventor tracks precision down I think six decimal places of a millimeter, which is a few more decimal places of an inch. But it's a very small number.
So the model is technically perfect, right? And then we have to somehow turn that into something real. And bear in mind that any time that you create a CAM tool path, it's using that model to generate the position for the tool.
So at least in our part of the world, people just get used to messing with diameters and compensation all the time to get things to come out the way it says on the drawing. I mean, that's the way everybody's always done it. And, yeah, it's OK. It gets the job done. But you've got to be quite strict on yourself to keep track of all of those numbers. So that if you run the job again in six months, you don't still have to scrap the first part while you dial in your tolerances.
So what we try and do is drive that from the model. Now most modeling systems, most CAD packages out there, have the ability to put a tolerance on the model. So I can say that's not 50.000, it's 50.04 to 50.06. And I'm intentionally using tolerance limits that are both on the positive side of nominal, right?
But where most of them differ to Inventor is that the only reason you can put it in on the model is so that you can think about it at the time that you're modeling. And in the drawing later when you dimension that hole with an annotation, you can pull that tolerance through so that the dimension has the tolerance on it, right? That's the only reason it's there.
So if you want to use it for CAM, the software still thinks that the model is 50, regardless of the tolerance. I've been asking a lot of people, I haven't found someone that knows how to do that in SolidWorks. Apparently, SolidWorks, that's the case, is that the tolerance is only used to pull it through the drawing.
Inventor is different. If you bring up this Parameters window and you look at that diameter tolerance, you see these little yellow circles here. These were a complete mystery to me for probably the first 10 years of my Inventor use.
Why are there? What's the point? Why am I changing this number, and what's it for?
And eventually when I figured out what it was doing, I realized that if you had a model tolerance and you change this from a yellow circle, which is median, to the minus, which is obviously the lower limit, or the plus, which is the upper limit, or, really handy for machinists, the median, which is the triangle-- sorry, I said median before when I meant nominal-- the yellow circle is nominal. So by default all of those will be set to nominal and ignore the tolerance completely.
But if I go into the diameter parameter, I just left tick that little arrow and go Tolerance, and put in a deviation of 0.06, 0.04-- so that's the numbers that I mentioned before, so they're both on the plus side-- you'll see that that's still sitting at 50.000. And you can measure that bore all day long, and it's always 50.000.
But if we go back into this window now and we change that to plus and hit Done and go back and measure it, you'll see that's now 50.06. The model is 50.6-- it's not just an annotation. So if I generate my tool part based on that, the CAM and the xy position, if say we were all on center line, it's going to go out to x25.03 minus [? tool ?] comp. So that will generate what we want.
So you can use this in a couple of ways. You can either say, well, let's shoot for median. I mean, bear in mind, with this, the reason I use that example with the limits on both sides of the nominal, if we set it to nominal, we're never going to hit it first time, unless you happen to have the wear comp adjusted right the first time.
Whereas if you sit it to median, for most jobs you're probably going to get within the range on the first one. So I set median there. Let me go back in here. And you'll notice there it says 50.5 now.
So that system allows you to control your CAM in a smarter way and rely less on wear compensation and have to use it less, I suppose. I say wear compensation, but I mean any form of fudging the diameter of the tool to get it within spec.
Does that make sense? Any questions on that?
Now obviously one other thing that comes up when we talk about this a lot is that any of you using the AnyCAD technology to bring in reference files from SolidWorks or CATIA or Pro/E or any of those CAD packages. So we see it quite a bit with machine shops that deal with customer files where it's not their own product, where one guy is sending a step file and the other guy is sending a Pro/E and another woman is sending an NX file and whatever.
When those all come in, Inventor has the ability to open them in a way with our associative-- the Inventor model is associative, back to the original file. So if the original file changes, it updates it in Inventor. So there's all sorts of capability with that.
But one of the things that comes up a lot is when the file comes in from outside and you don't have the native feature to deal with, you might have a hole where the designer has used the package that models the hole at the nominal diameter.
Oh, this is going to test me-- if it was a 3.8 hole, the hole in the model would be 3/8. But really, you for the programming might want the tetradiameter. Don't ask me what the tetradiameter is for a 3/8 hole. And there's probably a few, right?
So in that scenario, if I just open a step file to show you-- come on-- I'm going to change to Step. It's in here somewhere. There.
You as the programmer might want to modify that hole to get it to what you want just for the CAM. You don't want to affect the original file, you just want to make some changes that suit you.
Where I'm going with this, pretend this hole is not what we want. 47 and a 1/2-- just pretend we want 50, right?
I can't go and edit that hole feature because I don't have it. It's not a native file, this is some generic thing that I brought in.
Inventor has this awesome tool called Direct Edit, just here. And it took me quite awhile. I've been using direct edit for a long time before I discovered this little veto. I can pick out any feature and I can do all sorts of things like drag the position, move that hole around.
But that's not the point of what I'm trying to demonstrate here. The bit that I hadn't seen was that if I pick a face and change to the size set up, by default when I adjust it, it's going to adjust the offset. So this offset of minus 9.35 will be stored in the parameters table, but it's not very friendly to deal with because I've now got to do the math-- 47 and 1/2 and figure out what that minus 9.25 offset is going to do.
But there's this little drop down here where I can say, rather than offset I just want to set the diameter. And I can make this whatever I like. So if I make that 50 and go into my Parameters window, you can see there that there's a 50 mill diameter dimension. And I can put a tolerance on it, just the same as I just showed you.
But now I have a CAM version of this part where it's nondestructive, right? I can go and suppress that direct edit, and the model will jump back to exactly how it was. But I can have the model the way I want it-- oops, shouldn't have done that-- I can have the model the way I want it just for CAM programming. So that's a really handy feature if you're doing those direct edits all the time.
All right, so at the start of the class in the handout-- I don't know if you've downloaded the handout, but it's there if you want it. Again, we're asked to define some learning objectives. So these were them.
So what I hope to have achieved is a basic learning or basic understanding of how to use iLogic to start to control your Inventor models, to apply them and part or work holding scenarios. So hopefully we've ticked that box. And then learn how to use templates to work with those configurable designs to try and speed up the creation of new unique instances of things.
Then using the probing cycles as a QA check on a machine dimension during the production process. And then because we're talking precision, they're effectively using tolerances to then make your model more of the guiding source of truth, I suppose, rather than having some information about how the model should be in the CAD and some information on the control.
So that's it, basically. And now we've got about 10 minutes for questions.
Just before we do questions, I haven't figured out how to do it. I'd love to hear if any of you have. But in the mobile app, you're supposed to be able to fill out a survey. It would be really great if you could give me some feedback on what you thought and what you'd like to see next time if I can come back.
But I haven't figured out how to use the surveys in the app. So it'd be really good if you figure it out to do it. Thanks.
AUDIENCE: You're smart enough to figure out iLogic and coding and all that, [INAUDIBLE] survey.
GAVIN BATH: I cannot figure out the mobile app. I'm sure that wasn't developed by Autodesk.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: All right, so are there any questions? Yeah, sure.
AUDIENCE: Just when you use Inventor on an object, type of [INAUDIBLE] iLogic [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: I really hope so. I don't know if it'll be iLogic, but I really hope they build an equivalent because for me that's a big lacking area at the moment. But I can't answer your question, I'm sorry. I only know limited things about Fusion's direction based on the roadmap that they publish. Anything more than that, I don't know any more than you, unfortunately.
AUDIENCE: I just think that iLogic or [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Yep, yep.
AUDIENCE: Fusion [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: So they're actually.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] There might be something similar.
GAVIN BATH: Similar, yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: So I've heard recently they're deprecating or getting rid of the JavaScript API and Fusion altogether. So it'll just be Python and C++, I think. I don't know.
There's also no model tolerancing as far as I know inside Fusion, I don't think.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: No? OK. So a lot of the stuff you can't do in Fusion yet. But I'm sure it will happen at some point. Sure.
AUDIENCE: Question about going back to where you're seeing each of your four [INAUDIBLE]. And then it's basically outputting the difference what the machine can [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Yes.
AUDIENCE: To bring down the tolerance. Is there a way if we wanted to sneak in data capture over time where we can then [INAUDIBLE] tool libraries, where we can know the longevity of the tool, being able to capture [? data? ?]
GAVIN BATH: That sounds awesome, and that to me sounds like it might be going the IoT route. I don't know-- with machine feedback?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: The Renishaw [INAUDIBLE]. It's not part of it.
GAVIN BATH: But I was just thinking about that. If Renishaw has the ability to export data or whatever, maybe a database that iLogic picks up on. We don't have the API link to be able to get that into the tool library at the moment. But might be able to be--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: I mean, potentially some--
AUDIENCE: Real quick is that actually the other day I [INAUDIBLE] right on Autodesk [? hosting ?] where a few times they do that [INAUDIBLE] Renishaw and they have their values [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: All right.
AUDIENCE: So when you open up your tool library, it won't say, oh, it's a 0.250, and it'll say 0.248 directly right [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Wow.
AUDIENCE: So they're doing it right now. [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Would that be HSM or would that be the Delcam products?
AUDIENCE: You have to use it.
GAVIN BATH: So I wonder how they get it back into the tool library? Is there an API for the tool library?
AUDIENCE: I haven't seen the video. I didn't see the video.
GAVIN BATH: I haven't seen it.
AUDIENCE: There's a lot of stuff that's being worked on. But if I understood question, [INAUDIBLE] it's a powerful thing in the industry. But when Renishaw comes down and it's outputting that size to [INAUDIBLE] variable, then there's all kinds of options to use those captured things.
GAVIN BATH: Right, right.
AUDIENCE: There's all kinds of ways you can do something like that.
GAVIN BATH: Right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Well, I think Kevin's question is can we use that captured data back inside Inventor. Can we get back into the definition?
AUDIENCE: So one of the things that we are doing, and the reason we have partners like [INAUDIBLE] and Datron down here. We work really hard with those guys to [INAUDIBLE]. That's part of the
GAVIN BATH: Wow.
AUDIENCE: The attraction to Fusion beyond the cloud so you can do more [INAUDIBLE] your control, Kevin. There will never be that functionality. But the new control is a lot more things that aren't being tapped. But the reason we partnered with [? Daytron ?] on this is [? Daytron ?] is a smaller dynamic company that [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: Interesting.
AUDIENCE: There will be a day where you could change [INAUDIBLE] machine and have it go back and update your [? CAM. ?]
GAVIN BATH: Cool. Awesome.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] It automatically adjusts it.
GAVIN BATH: Right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Is that the Kennametal system you're talking about?
AUDIENCE: What's that?
GAVIN BATH: Is that the Kennametal system, did you say?
AUDIENCE: No, that's actual machine [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Oh, right, OK, OK.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: I think Sandvik has some sort of feedback, some tools. It's got it feedback in the shanks or something.
AUDIENCE: So Mazak has that in [? controllable. ?] What we're working with it here is [INAUDIBLE]
GAVIN BATH: Right, interesting.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] system. You'll need to [INAUDIBLE] set parameter so you can get this much [INAUDIBLE] tools. So it automatically changed to [INAUDIBLE].
GAVIN BATH: Right, right, yeah.
Good, anything else? All right, well, if you're happy to go.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.