Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to apply Fusion 360 to improve internal CNC machine-shop practices.
- Learn about applying Fusion 360 (and our Fusion 360 add-in) to reduce the CAM learning curve.
- Discover one approach to integrating Fusion 360 with internal and customer-facing, cloud-based IT systems.
- Learn how to use Fusion 360 with cloud-based manufacturing services.
Speaker
- Dave BoswellDave is CEO and co-founder of SendItCNC Inc., a startup that provides CNC machines in the cloud. Dave's an entrepreneur and technologist with a passion for software engineering and CNC machining. Dave has held key executive positions and been an early-stage investor at exceptional software startups that defined significant new markets and set standards in the industry. Dave has been a frequent presenter at conferences, and instructed university-level courses in software engineering. Dave has B.Math and M.Math degrees in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, and received the 2003 JW Graham Medal in Computer Science and Innovation.
DAVE BOSWELL: OK, a warm welcome to everyone. Hi. I'm Dave Boswell, co-founder and CEO of SendItCNC. We run a CNC job shop, specializing in prototypes and small runs. So every day is exciting for us because every job is something new and different.
Now, most of us here at SendItCNC have software engineering backgrounds. And we started doing this about 10 years ago just because we loved CNC manufacturing. Being from the software world, we're also working on software that makes it easy to run a CNC job shop. When we standardized on Fusion 360, it was inspiring for us. And we'd like to share the journey that took us on because we ended up with a more reliable and predictable set of operations and a better customer experience.
Here is an overview of the journey that Fusion launched us on. First, we got Fusion 360 in, oh, about 2015. And it was transformative for us. Looking back, we shouldn't have been surprised because we went from a G-code centered world to a CAM-centric world.
And in the course of fully embracing Fusion's integrated CAD and CAM, we naturally established protocols for our best practices, for example, rules that Fusion files had to conform to for our shop. A simple example is this-- use only raw material sizes that are actually available off the shelf in inventory. But those best practices go far beyond that and try to standardize everything we do, from tooling to workholding setups.
Then we automated those best practices using Fusion 360's add-in capability. Now, somewhat to our surprise, it turned out that made it very straightforward to integrate with our business systems, like quoting, sales, and order management.
Now, even though most of us at the SendItCNC team have software engineering backgrounds, we still made plenty of G-code mistakes. And as I'm sure you know, it's never pretty when you have an error in the programming of a CNC machine because a CNC machine is just an uber strong robot with no common sense and armed with a carbide cutter spinning at 15,000 RPM. It can do a lot of damage.
So Fusion CAM was a wonderful thing for us because it automated that tedious and error prone job of G-code programming. The more we embraced Fusion CAM, the better it became. So modeling just the minimum for CAM, like we show here, the cutter and the workpiece, well, that works. And it's more reliable than G-coding.
But it turns out we can do much better than that. So we fully modeled our tool library so that every tool holder has-- every tool, excuse me, has a holder. And it is an accurate representation of the actual physical holder. Then we fully modeled our frequently used setups, like the milling vise shown here. And we made a rule that we'd only run jobs in our shop after we had fully modeled not just the workpiece, but the tools and the setup-- no shortcuts, no exception.
Now, what that did, well, all this lowered the incidence of, what I'll call gingerly, accidental miss machining, you know, cutting vise jaws, rubbing tool holders against workholding, breaking probe stems. And it reduced the risks of outright CNC machine crashes. The result was improved process reliability, all just by leveraging Fusion 360's capabilities.
So we got to a point where at the beginning of a job we'd go through four steps. We'd start with the model of what we were making. Sometimes we'd get that model from a customer. Sometimes we'd make it our self in Fusion.
Then, we'd insert the workholding model, say a vise in this example. And then, we'd adjust the workholding model to the job, to the workpiece. We'd adjust the stock size and position it, say, close to the vise jaws in this case. Then, we could go over to the manufacturing workspace and define a CAM setup and finally get started CAM-ing the part. And that was a pretty good system.
But it got much better when we learned to start with the workholding setup instead and insert the model of the part into the workholding setup. This is a subtle sounding difference. But it turns out to have big benefits in the Fusion world because it lets you have predefined CAM setups and operations ready to go.
And by the way, we first heard about this in one of John Saunders great NYC CNC YouTube videos. So credit where credit's due on that.
So our standard then became import the model into the setup and adjust the setup as required. Then start CAM-ing with a setup already defined. So fast and easy because the CAM setup is already defined. And you can have some predefined CAM operations there to start with as well.
That worked so well that we made the investment to build a Fusion 360 add-in that automated that process. So let's take a look. Select the model first. You can see we're going down there, and I'll go over and select the model. And now, hit Create setup. There's some options there, but I'm just going to go with the defaults. Now, it'll bring in the model, adjust the stock size, and so forth, and create the setup. Just that easy.
So for our job shop this made CAM setup creation instant. It also automated work that included the opportunity to make errors, like defining that CAM setup. Now at this point, you might say, yeah, but what about second operations? And, you know, I use a lot of different setups, and I always customize them. So this feels like the rails may be too narrow. It might be a little too restrictive for me in the real world.
Well, of course, we live in that same real world. And I want to show you in the next couple of slides how we've addressed some of these questions. So let's add a second operation.
Just select Second operation. And then say we're using this operation. Operation is used, I'll click that check box. And you'll see that the vise automatically closes on the workpiece. Now we have a first and second operation defined with CAM setups for both.
And now, the machinists here know that we probably wouldn't hold a part like that for the second operation. So let's customize that a bit. Let's set the workpiece a little deeper in the vise jaws on the middle step. There we go. Done. Easy.
Now, let's take a look at the manufacturing workspace for this design and setup. And you can see that we have a couple of setups, just as you would expect. And there are some predefined operations in there with some CAM operations for each. I didn't mention it before, but that Setup app is smart enough to adjust the stock size to the sizes that are available in our inventory.
So you can see that building a CAM setup for a new job is a walk in the park for us and just take seconds thanks to Fusion and this automated setup builder. We call it the SendItCNC app, which by the way, is available free today on the Fusion App Store. If you want to use the setup builder in your own shop, you'll have to customize things a bit for your world.
The vise here is pretty generic and easily can be edited to represent the particular kind of milling vise you might use, same with the predefined CAM operations and the tool library and available stock sizes. But the nice thing is then with the automatically generated setup, you can dive right in and start adding CAM operations. Now, we'll come back to this in a moment and look at the range of setup customizations available and other kinds of setups available to you with this system.
Now, before we make any part, we need to get an idea of what the actual cost of that part is going to be. And this is pretty simple to do manually. You just add up the material cost, the machining time, estimates for the setup cost.
But because we now have a precisely defined library of setups tools and for that matter stock or raw materials, this is easy to automate. So as you can see, we made another Fusion 360 add-in. From the manufacturer workspace, this add-in submits a job-- job just means a Fusion CAD/CAM file-- to an app in the cloud that looks at our pricing and material inventory and makes an instant price estimate, which you're looking at here.
So for those of you who are interested in what kind of app this is in the cloud, well, it's an AWS serverless app, mostly written in TypeScript. There's a Hugo front end, which is what we're looking at now. We're looking at the user portal into that app. And we call the app the Job Management Server.
You can see the estimate for this job right here. And so now, we could provide a quote to the customer. Or if we like, we can just proceed with the job by going through checkout. Let's do that.
So here's the Checkout screen. Checkout is handled by our shopping cart system, which is implemented in Shopify, for those that are interested. The system also handles inventory, pricing data, sales transactions, payments and shipping. So it takes a lot of business issues off the table for us.
Some jobs come from customers outside our organization. And some come from us internally, like prototypes or items for sale on our own web store. So we can create a job here. And further, we can also give the customer access to this so that they can see the quote and order the part all online when they're ready. And in fact, we've opened this up to all Fusion users so that anyone here can submit a job and get their part made. Once checkout is complete, as you can see, we're back at the user portal to the Job Management server.
Let's look at what happens now that there's a job and it's ready to be executed. Now, I can see my job here and its status. But let's look under the covers at what we do internally at SendItCNC.
Here's a screenshot of our internal job administration console. You can see the particular job we just submitted and its status. Validation is an important step before we run the job.
So for the stock, the tools, the setup used, we verify that what's found in the Fusion file matches what is declared for the job. So for example, every tool used is checked to make sure it's the actual tool from our tool library and has not been modified. In this case, that's accomplished by another Fusion add-in called the SendItCNC Examiner.
Then, we ensure that the CAM simulates collision free. Then we examine every operation and, in fact, every parameter of every operation and check to make sure that its value is correct, or at least within acceptable bounds. If a discrepancy is found, maybe it's correctable, or it might invalidate the job. Then, according to the amount of risk, we can run a simulator, like Vericut, to make sure that cutter loads are acceptable.
Now, you might say, sure, we understand need to do that validation for a customer submitted job or a Fusion user submitted job, but don't you just trust yourselves internally with internally submitted jobs? The answer is, no, we don't. Or maybe I should say this-- sure, we trust everybody, including ourselves, trust but verify. And that's what this is about.
Here's a screenshot of our Examiner checking the tools used and correcting where possible. Every tool is checked to make sure that every specification is consistent with the actual tool from our tool library and hasn't been modified. So as I'm sure you're aware, a slight modification to, say, cutter stick out length, say, to accommodate part geometry can cause a nasty collision.
So if we're going to do something like that, we define a new special tool corresponding to a different physical cutter. And we add it to the library-- no exceptions and no shortcuts. So back to the user portal now to the Job Management server, and you can see the job going through the process of validation and then execution. And then, it gets sent to the shop floor to actually get made.
So let's just have a high-level look at what our system looks like. In Fusion 360, the CAD/CAM designed for the CNC job is created. And the setup maker assists in that. The job submitter add-in sends the CAD/CAM file and other job specs over to the Job Management server. That creates a transaction in the business systems.
And importantly, the Job Management server keeps track of the jobs and the validation and execution. If everything looks good, the Job Manager sends the job to the shop floor for execution. And by the way, there's another add-in that I didn't mention previously, which installs and maintains that library of setups and the tool library and library of CAM templates and so on. So it's really quite a simple system.
Let's look at a couple more aspects of this system. First of all, the basic Setup Maker, as I said, is available free of charge in the App Store. Here is the actual screenshot of the actual Ascendancy app in the App Store. You can use it with your own CNC machines and modify it for your workholding devices and tool library. And you can even, as I said, submit jobs to us for machining and immediate shipment to you.
Here we see the Library Manager add-in downloading and installing the tool libraries and template libraries. And that's all handled automatically. It doesn't happen quite as quickly as it's shown here. I did speed up the video just to get the point across of what happens.
Now, I'd like to illustrate a setup other than a vise in a milling machine. And I'd also like to show some interesting setup customization. So let's take a quick look at making this part, call it a coaster, in two operations on a lathe.
I select a lathe. And then I select the part that we're going to make the coaster. I click Create setup. And you can see we've got the lathe chuck.
I am changing the jaws to a more appropriate jaw type, reverse jaws, for this shape of part. And I adjusted it to be on the middle step of those reverse jaws. Now, I'm going to change the stock offset a little bit to give me a little thickness to get the part set out from the chuck.
I went over to the second operation, which on a lathe looks very similar, and the workholding looks very similar to the first. And I made the second operation for the lathe setup. Now, I've gone over to the manufacture workspace. And this is all going by very quickly. I'll add an operation or two and remove the parting operation that we're not going to need. And then I'll just go into CNC Simulation and take the model and the workholding out of view so you can get an idea of what the result will look like. There's our final part-- beautiful.
And finally, I'd like to show another example, this time making a part on a fourth axis with two subsequent operations. This also illustrates where that red and black SendItCNC logo comes from. It is a view of a Turner Cube, which this object is called. It's an icon in the machine shop world.
So let's take a look at making a Turner Cube on a fourth axis. I'm going to select fourth axis setup, rotary stock and holders. It's going to hold this in a dovetail holder, as a matter of fact. And you'll see, if you were to submit this for quote, that it would specify dovetail stock. I went through the setup for the second operation.
This is for the third operation. I'm holding it deep in the vise to mill off that dovetail. Here, I am over in the manufacturing workspace. Going to take a look at the CNC setup for the first, the second, and now the third operations. It's all going by very quickly I know.
And now, I'm going to actually switch over to the full CAM to make the Turner Cube, which is probably simpler than it looks. I'm going to run this in Simulation, take the model out of the view so that you can see the beautiful finished Turner Cube. There we go. And I like that video so much I'm going to play it again as we go through the summary.
So for us, this was a Fusion centric digital transformation of our entire business. We set out to embrace Fusion 360 and CAM coming from a G-code centric world-- transformational for us. We leveraged Fusion 360 capabilities, including in particular the Fusion 360 add-in capability. We leveraged that for two things-- one to automate the CAD/CAM best practices for our shop and, two, to create a simple integration with our business operational systems.
As software guys, we were a bit obsessed with automating not just the machining process, but also the operational processes and business processes in order to close off sources of error that made the operation of our business more reliable, efficient, and predictable. Fusion 360 was the essential enabler of that transformation. We just leveraged Fusion's capabilities to integrate our manufacturing and business operations. In the end, this improved our process reliability and predictability and helped us deliver a better customer experience.
Of course, we welcome questions and discussions. And you can reach me personally at dave@senditcnc.com. As. We said, the basic Setup Maker is available free on the App Store. You can adapt the workholding models and tool library to your environment. There's also a more advanced paid version of the app in the App Store that supports 4 and 5 axis setups on milling machines and also lathe setups.