How to Get Started with CAM Within Fusion 360

PRESENTER 1: Hi, everybody.

MARTI DEANS: Hi, everyone. We're having some technical difficulties, of course, as it goes. But there's some stuff that we can do without the projector on. Ideally, this class is going to be mostly in product in Fusion 360, going through the CAM workflows. Hopefully we'll get to that point, but first I wanted to introduce myself and Tim. I'm Marti Deans. On the technical marketing team for Fusion 360, specializing in CAM. This is Tim Paul.

TIM PAUL: Tim Paul. I've been a machinist for a long time. I'm the customer success manager in CAM, I think is my title for Fusion. Marti and worked together until just recently. She's moved over to tech marketing. I'm here to just dazzle you with my good looks, and she'll run the CAM for us.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah. Tim and I also-- while we're waiting, I'll quickly plug. A lot of the work that we did before I left the team was on creating adoption content. So when people first get started in Fusion, which actually-- who is new to Fusion in the room? OK. Most people. Cool. Who's new to CAM in the room? OK. Nice. And who's new to machining in general? OK.

TIM PAUL: So new to CAM-- not to jump in, but it looks like we got a minute. If anybody could raise their hand that is new to CAM-- I saw a lot of people that's new to CAM, but not new to machining. What are you guys doing now? Somebody over here? No? Was there any new to CAM but not new to machining? OK.

AUDIENCE: I took machine classes 10 years ago.

TIM PAUL: OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIM PAUL: OK. Cool.

MARTI DEANS: Nice.

TIM PAUL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I've worked in [INAUDIBLE].

TIM PAUL: Got you.

AUDIENCE: I've worked with [INAUDIBLE], so I get it.

TIM PAUL: Yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE: But now I'm teaching, and I have a shop class [INAUDIBLE]--

TIM PAUL: Cool.

MARTI DEANS: Nice.

AUDIENCE: --and I try to teach them throughout the shop class with Fusion.

TIM PAUL: Awesome.

AUDIENCE: Me too.

TIM PAUL: Marti was getting ready to talk about our adoption content.

MARTI DEANS: For those of you who are new, which it seems like is a lot of people in the room, we put together-- Tim and I specifically built out CAM content, so learning Fusion CAM.

TIM PAUL: Marti did it all.

AUDIENCE: Tim did some. That is all available for free online. I have a couple of slides on it, but the link is, you know, a link. So I will be adding a handout with that linked content soon. There's also lessons on modeling, . sculpting, direct modeling, simulation, pretty much every part of Fusion, And what's not existing will be added. That's all currently in development, being redone as the product updates and whatnot. So that's a really good resource for when you're getting started. And I helped build it, so I think it's pretty good.

TIM PAUL: CAD people, anybody CAD users but new to Fusion CAD? Any of those people? I can share my experience. I'm a longtime SolidWorks user before I started working for Autodesk, and my transition to Fusion, to be honest, was frustrating, because it was a different type of thinking. And in the content that Marti's is talking about, there's a lot of good CAD guides to get you going. There's a Fusion for SolidWorks Users. For me, it was the thing that was the aha moment.

I always just search for Fusion 360. And up in the top toolbar there's Start Here, or Getting Started, something like that. All that content's in there, and if you scroll down on one of them, there's a Fusion for SolidWorks Users. So I always-- if you're SolidWorks people, definitely check that out. For me, the joints and mates and all this stuff put me for a spin, but once I got it, it's great.

MARTI DEANS: And that's on the Learning page, too, which is this fusion360.autodesk.com. There's a-- I think it's Support and Learning dropdown menu, and then there's Learning Content. That's the SolidWorks transition guide, which is super helpful. Got a lot of really positive feedback on that. And then there's some other general learning content. I always plug adoption because I know the people who made it. I know it's really good. But there's also more generalized learning content available.

Who has Fusion downloaded, has played around in it? OK. Keep your hand up if you've played around in Fusion. And then who's been in it for around an hour? OK. That's good. That's good. Who's been in it for a day ish? Over a day? A week? A month?

TIM PAUL: So we're all pretty new people.

MARTI DEANS: That's good.

TIM PAUL: Looks like we're getting close here. Whatever you guys are doing, looks good.

MARTI DEANS: Looking good.

TIM PAUL: I would encourage people to play with the CAD as well as the CAM. In my opinion, part of the power of that integrated workspace is-- there's a lot of things you can do to leverage that environment. So the better you are in the CAD, generally, the better you are in the CAM. We need to get moving, huh? Tell me again how many people are actually cutting parts now? So we've got three people. Awesome.

MARTI DEANS: OK does everyone have access to a machine?

TIM PAUL: Cool.

MARTI DEANS: OK.

TIM PAUL: What are you using right now?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIM PAUL: [INAUDIBLE]. Awesome. Fusion. Have you used any other CAM? What other CAM? Not picking on you, but--

AUDIENCE: Visual Mill and--

TIM PAUL: Visual.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIM PAUL: Cool. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TIM PAUL: Yes.

MARTI DEANS: Yup.

TIM PAUL: Marti has a PowerPoint slide that shows what I call legacy CAM, and that's-- so my background before I started working here is, I started-- I did a lot of things. But I started a machine shop for L3 Communications, and very rarely would we get through-- well, they-- never would we design a part, make it, and it was good.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah. You show me someone who cuts the part that they've very first designed, I'll show you a liar. There's no way.

TIM PAUL: Yeah. I mean, my stuff that I design always goes right the first time, but-- so if you guys saw the SpaceX satellite that blew up on the launch pad probably six, seven, eight, months ago, the last project that I worked on at L3 was up in there, burning to the ground. And the hardest part-- we had revision, like, 27, and it was 300 tool operations. So every time the a-hole engineer would change something-- before, it would be 40, 50, 60 hours of programming to redo, literally would turn into minutes to redo. Probably another half an hour to trust it and get validated and stuff, but--

AUDIENCE: Often just regenerate and you're done.

TIM PAUL: Yeah. Yeah. Often it was regenerate and stare at it, trying to believe that it worked. And then we had to re-post it.

Has anybody gone through any of the adoption content?

MARTI DEANS: Yes.

TIM PAUL: Two people. YouTube videos?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARTI DEANS: Mhm.

TIM PAUL: OK. YouTube used to be the best place to learn. My experience was that I just banged around in it. If I had any questions, I would do-- I would always search Google. I would go to Google and search Fusion and whatever are searching for. And I would always add YouTube at the end, because that search for some reason is better than YouTube's, which shouldn't make any sense because it's the same place. We do apologize for the delay. We didn't have access to the room until right before the class.

I did a spreadsheet for the adoption CAM content. That's-- what did I say-- 54 minutes just to take you from fundamentals. I think-- was that probing and everything? It was under two hours for three plus two, probing, and everything. But I think it's 54 minutes that takes you all the way through 3D. I talked to two friends that just went through our-- shop friend people. They said it took about five hours, because they watched it four times and worked through it two or three times. But it's a really good place to start.

MARTI DEANS: OK. We have PowerPoint. Now we've talked for 15 minutes about most of this stuff in this PowerPoint. We'll just go really fast. But basically, this is just background on the whole CAM industry. It started in the '80s, around the same time that the DynaTAC phone came out, the very first one, in-- what's the-- Wall Street. We just figured out the movie.

TIM PAUL: Who's seen Wall Street?

MARTI DEANS: So good.

TIM PAUL: Neither of us have. No, I haven't.

MARTI DEANS: No, I saw it.

TIM PAUL: I haven't

MARTI DEANS: In some weird, backwards world, I saw it. But-- I don't remember the exact stats, but it took hours, to charge, held a charge for 30 minutes, cost in today's dollars something like 9,000 2017.

TIM PAUL: Has anybody owned something like this? Oh.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. It's old, right? It's got some mild functionality. One way you could have developed it is to just stick on new features. And that'd be completely absurd, right? That's not how technology works. So today we have something shiny new. Some people still think it's expensive, but it's not $9,000 2017 dollars. It's a complete redesign. It's totally different. They scrapped DynaTAC. They didn't just pop things on top of this older model. Went fully different.

This is the analogy to Fusion 360. Instead of just adding on top of 30-year-old CAM, or however many years it's been now, we've started from-- well, we started from HSM, but a newer, leaner--

TIM PAUL: So HSM--

MARTI DEANS: --CAM program.

TIM PAUL: --is the kernel that drives Fusion CAM. So if anybody's heard of HSMWorks words and vendor HSM, it's essentially the same kernel with a different interface. I became a customer of HSM in 2011, shortly after they started. And honestly, it felt like the first fresh CAM. I feel like I get dumber and dumber the more I use my iPhone and iPad, but in reality, it's just more intuitive. That's the idea, that our CAM should be more intuitive.

MARTI DEANS: And we know the guys who wrote it. We know the two guys-- they're here. One of them's here.

TIM PAUL: Yup.

MARTI DEANS: So yeah, it's new. The normal-- we'll go pretty quick through this stuff, but the normal process, you design something. You maybe do some kind of engineering on it, simulation or whatever. And then you make it. This is the ideal world. We just go right down that road, and we're done. And we have our part in our hand and we're super happy.

TIM PAUL: Let's hope my parts work.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah. That's Tim's world. The rest of us have to make changes. And before-- or if you're not using integrated tools-- so if you take it out to do simulation, take it out to do CAM, have to go back all the way into SolidWorks or whatever to model, it's really long. And any change at any point in this process, you have to basically start over, or effectively start over. So it's a lot of work, and it's definitely not the linear, pretty process that we like to think it is.

In manufacturing, you can take that whole process and do the exact same thing in CAM. So, this is the like standalone CAM workflow. You have eight steps. Anytime anything happens. So the first time, pretty normal. You export you CAD data, bring it into CAM, you do all the CAM stuff on it, and then you post your code. Seems fine. But then if something changes, you have to rinse and repeat that whole process. So it's eight steps, and you know these four in the middle, we're like oh yeah, four steps. But that can take a pretty long time to get it right. So you're spending hours, days, weeks, whatever. And then Gina calls you up and says, oh, we have to redesign it. And you're like, OK, great. So we're going to just start this process over.

So integration, bringing that CAM and CAD together, and even engineering tools if you're running simulations, really shortens this process down to about nine steps approximately. So you take away the need to import and export, it all lives natively in the same space, in the same software, in the same canvas. You don't-- I forgot the other steps again. I should've just x-ed them out. [LAUGHS] But when the big time saver and the really cool part is when something changes, you basically just regenerate those tool paths you've already applied to the geometry. Sometimes the change is pretty severe, and you do have to go in and tweak some things. But a lot of the time, you can get away with just regenerate that tool path and it updates to fit the model. So that's the real power of integrated CAM that I love, is that you're just in this nice tight little loop and you don't have to do that whole restarting process.

TIM PAUL: Has anybody done this? You know, change the part in Fusion, change the part and just regenerated tool paths. Have you had any problems with it?

AUDIENCE: No.

TIM PAUL: So, to let you know.

AUDIENCE: As long as you're working with something that doesn't require changing the bit size or something like that.

TIM PAUL: OK.

AUDIENCE: Just the whole move.

TIM PAUL: So I worked at L3. I sold this workflow to them. And it was awesome because they went from those 27 revisions just got a lot faster. And sometimes, if they were going to move that center whole, just to let you know the way it works, is if it's a geometry selected thing, and all they did was parametrically change it, then everything is great. If they thought it was a good idea to delete it, make a new whole, then there's the face has a name in the background. So, if you guys are making changes, try to do it more intelligently. You're working in a really awesome parametric environment, so. That will make your life.

MARTI DEANS: Top one, be smart.

TIM PAUL: Be smart.

MARTI DEANS: Lesson one of this class.

TIM PAUL: Yeah.

MARTI DEANS: So what we use and what our solution to this problem has been, I mean, we have-- Inventor has integrated CAM. We've built integrated CAM for SolidWorks. And now we have Fusion, which is not only CAD and CAM, but also those engineering simulation tools, rendering, sheet metal, everything else. So we're going to hop into the product now, finally. The moment we've been waiting for.

TIM PAUL: Yeah, so it sounds like you'll just have to drag it in.

MARTI DEANS: I don't know what I was--

TIM PAUL: I don't think they need to look at the back of your head, do they?

MARTI DEANS: There it is. I don't know.

TIM PAUL: There you go. That was easy.

MARTI DEANS: We're going to, oh man, OK. I'm going to do my best. [LAUGHS] So we're [LAUGHS]. So we're in Fusion, we're In the model workspace, I think. And so most of you have been in the product, which is awesome, but we're going to take it pretty slow. Feel free to ask questions. I know we've been talking at you for about 30 minutes, but do feel free to ask questions, stop me if I'm going too fast. We have plenty of time, kind of. So we're going to go into the CAM workspace. So these are the other work spaces that I was referencing earlier. So this is where you've got patching, surfacing tools, sculpting tools, if you want to make like industrial design parts, simulation, and then CAM.

So in the CAM workspace, I have the ribbon at the top is now all CAM tools, and it's very much left to right. So we start out with the set up dropdown menu, that's the first thing I'm going to do, but this is like all my setup options are in here, and then all of the 2D tool paths, and then all the 3D paths, and then drilling for some reason is by itself. And then we get into multi-axis turning, cutting, and then all the way at the end over here, we have simulation and posting tools. So we're going to make our set up, apply our tool paths, and then use those generated tool paths to make code.

So we'll start out with the set up. And it goes a little crazy and it grabs everything in the workspace as the model. So what I mean when I say it grab it as the model, is Fusion will look at the model geometry, and it's pretty smart. It knows, when you define the model, it knows that that's what you want to cut, and you can make it do bad things your model. You can force it to gouge it or whatever, but by and large it's very model intelligent, and it knows when you select that model geometry, that that's the thing you want to make.

So to do that, I'm going to come over here, I'm going to skip all this stuff, and I'm just going to go right for the-- that's right, right?

TIM PAUL: Yeah, yeah.

MARTI DEANS: OK great. I can't see that.

TIM PAUL: Uh-huh. You can just look at your screen.

MARTI DEANS: What? Just look at my screen?

TIM PAUL: Never mind. Act like I didn't say that.

MARTI DEANS: I would, if I could.

[LAUGHTER]

So I selected that body as the model. And now it's doing a smarter job of that, yellow box is the stock body that it's generating, so now it's a little more realistic of what my stock would look like. I can also define fixtures. So the fixture definition doesn't save me entirely from collisions, it's not quite that smart, but what it can do is later on when I'm running a simulation, if there's a collision between something I define as a fixture and my tool, it will tell me that. It will say like, those are the two things that's colliding, your fixture and your tool, instead of your stock and your tool or something like that. So I can grab my-- I can grab everything. I usually just grab the jaws because I'm not really afraid I'm going to hit the rest my vise. I'm better than that, but I do grab my vise jaws.

So the other part of the set up-- I did skip this one-- is telling Fusion what we want to do. So milling, turning, and cutting, which is what we call water laser plasma operations, are the three different types of operation, or a different types of set up you can do. And then based on the set up being familiar, being for training, it's going to allow you to do different types of things. So if I went into a training set up, these options would be very different because training requires different information than milling. Then I'm going to define my work coordinate system. So this is how the part is oriented relative to the machine. So I want my axes to line up with what it's going to look like in the machine, and then the origin location is, I usually probe my stock, actually. So it's kind of depending on what I'm doing, but I usually probe the stock. So the origin is how the machine knows where the part is.

So to do this, I am like old school and I, weirdly enough, I like using these selection box-- yeah, I can't see that at all-- these selection boxes, but Tim likes using the UI. So if I grab the stem of the arrow, even though my selection that's highlighted right now, it wants me to pick a fixture, right? But if I click on the stem of the arrow, now it's automatically going to snap to defining the z-axis. And I can define the z-axis using parts of the model. So I can use-- I usually use a face, because usually something on my part is flat. If something on my part isn't flat, I can also use an axis, or I can use construction geometry. So like just really anything in the model workspace. I can even use the vise. So if I know that my vise is flat, or its modeled flat and perpendicular to the z-axis, I can click on that instead. So if you're making really industrial design parts where there's not a lot of flat surfaces, we're super flexible and let you just pick something else instead.

Do the same thing for x. I think it actually move-- yeah, it moves automatically on x for me. So I can pick an axis or something to define x. And then this is correct for how I have this laid out, like this is what the machine orientation would be. But if something were backwards, I can click on the arrow head, where the pointy part, and it will fli-- it'll flip the axis. I can also use the check box.

TIM PAUL: That hand will disappear in another week or two.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah.

TIM PAUL: But it kind of gets in the way. If you go see that little hand pop up, it's a bug.

MARTI DEANS: It is a bug. It's really annoying. To define the origin location, I can use stock box points, which is what I-- that's how I learned, because we just would probe our stock. But you can also, to try things way cooler, use it use a selected point. No that's right. One of them is selection, and you can take anything in the model workspace. So if you are making soft draws or something and you bore a hole in your soft draw, you can then select the center of that hole as your origin, and then probe that. So it's really, really flexible. That's definitely a little more advanced, but the option is there.

So I'm just going to grab something because I can't see. In the next tab, we have stock setup. So it's defining where your material is that you want to remove. So we already told it the model that we want to end up with, now we're going to tell it where all the other stuff that we want to get rid of is. I think the default is relative size box. So that's, it's snapping that yellow box around with I think like a quarter inch on each side by default. 40 thousandths?

TIM PAUL: If you close that, I'll tell you.

MARTI DEANS: 40 thousandths.

TIM PAUL: So it's 40 thou on the sides in the top, 0 on the bottom. And then the round up to the nearest is something that I ignored, because I'm a machinist. I don't like to round anything. But that's pretty interesting because if-- can you 0 that real quick? So if you guys look at this number here, it's some weird number that I can order stock in that number. But if you round that now, if you round that ti a quarter inch, because that's what I buy bar material to, you can see those numbers. That's going to be the size of my stock. So it rounds up to the next size that I would actually buy, so it's a nice little feature.

MARTI DEANS: So yeah, you're also not going to go to your chop saw and cut something to 40 thousandths, right? You're going to cut it about right.

TIM PAUL: Yeah.

MARTI DEANS: Especially if you're calling someone else to have them cut it, then they don't have time for that. So, I typically do-- my favorite thing in here is the from solid option. I don't think I have anything modeled up, but you can actually use a modeled body as your stock. So, especially if you're doing like part flips, you can tell it exactly where that leftover stock is going to be. If you're running it on the water jet first or something, you can have it modeled up so that the outer contour is already there. There's all kinds of use cases for that. It's really, really powerful.

TIM PAUL: Yeah, there's a ton of power that comes with having this CAD rich space that you can do things with. And using solid to define your stock, yeah.

MARTI DEANS: The much easier method without having to model anything is doing a fixed size box. This is what typically I'll start out my set up and whatnot with a relative size box, and then I'll actually walk around the shop and see what I have around, and then I'll measure it and throw the dimensions in here. It's always a good idea to round up a little, because your tool is under loaded instead of overloaded. So if it's close, you can always add a couple thousandths on there. I can't read any of this, so I'm just going to hit OK.

TIM PAUL: Just hit OK.

MARTI DEANS: Last thing, actually, while we're here. In the post-process tab, this is mostly optional. A lot of this stuff you can do at the end, especially naming the program, you'll have an option later. I usually just skip over it. But one thing to note is that 0, which is the default value, is the same as 1. So when you guys advance and you're running parts with multiple set ups and whatnot, just know you'll come back to this later, and you'll be like, ah-ha. That's what she was talking about. 0 and 1 both point to G54, which is your first work offset.

TIM PAUL: So then 2 is 55, 3 is 56, so on, and so on, and so on.

MARTI DEANS: But 0 and 1 mean the same thing. OK. So I hit OK, and now all the way over here, I have set up one as the active set up. So if I have like four or five setups for whatever reason, the active one, just like activating a component, that's where all my tool paths are going to go. So just make sure, I do this all the time, accidentally don't activate my set up, and then that tool path I spent time on ends up being like upside down or whatever. So, that's one thing to keep in mind.

So we're going to start out with a really, pretty simple tool path. Facing tool paths. So it's basically just going to go back and forth and remove that whatever 40 thousandths that's on top of the part. Very first thing that I always do is go and pick a tool. I'm getting a little ahead of myself. So every operation in Fusion 360, as some of you probably know, has five tabs. The first one is the tool tab, second one is the geometry tab, so I'm going to tell it what geometry I want to cut. For facing, this one's pretty easy. Then, the heights tab. So I can define the top height for the tool path, the bottom height for the tool path. So I can basically limit it between two between two planes. I think the visual here is really nice and I could like-- I'm not going to move the part around, but if I could, I could go sideways and look at those planes.

TIM PAUL: You could also go out and just grab those. That's why that dumb hand was there before. You can just go grab those planes and move them around visually. I'm not a--

MARTI DEANS: You're a math guy.

TIM PAUL: I'm a hard number kind of guy, so I like to put numbers in.

MARTI DEANS: In the plane. So, yeah, top height, bottom height, and then the retracting clearance height, where retract is the height that it lifts to within the operation. Clearance is the height that it moves to before moving onto the next operation. So that's the difference there.

TIM PAUL: Before you go off, and sorry to jump in.

MARTI DEANS: It's OK.

TIM PAUL: Marti said earlier that the software is very model intelligent. Well, it's also very stock intelligent, right? So if you look at the two bottom heights, it's going to cut everything from the top to the bottom. And you can see how it says from stock top. So if she goes back in there in a minute, she's going to realize she didn't add anything to the top. So she's going to add that. And you're going to see that now it's going to start facing from a higher bit there. So it's nice if you parametrically tie it to your stock, or your model, whatever your intent is. For any CAD people, you know when I'm designing something, I dimension to meet my intent. It's the same thing with the heights.

MARTI DEANS: Yep. Good point. Next tab is the passes tab. This is where, this is the tab that changes the most between operations. The first three are kind of similar, but this one is where we're going to actually control how the tool goes about cutting the material. So it gets pretty-- for facing, pretty simple. When we get into 3D operations, it can get, you know, a lot of options in there. A lot of different parameters, ways to control how the tool moves. And then last but not least, we have the linking tab, which is really more about lead in and lead out. So how the tool is going to enter the cut, what it's doing between those cutting passes. Is retracting? Is it staying down? Stuff like that.

So if we're facing. All you really need to do is grab a tool, which is on my [INAUDIBLE] monitor. So I have a library built out for this part already. I have my face built in here. I'm just going to grab it and hit OK. I have the option in here to change the feeds and speeds. So these are all tied to that tool. And, if I were to pick a different tool, which I can do really quickly, they're going to update to be correct for that tool. So they should have all changed.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARTI DEANS: That's a good question. As of right now, no. So you can build your own material libraries, so you can say, create a library for your whatever machine for aluminum, and then for wood, and then for steel, and tie it to it that way. But there is no built in option just to select the material.

TIM PAUL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So you have to be very careful [INAUDIBLE].

MARTI DEANS: Yeah. So like, for example, that's a really good question. And it's definitely something we hear a lot, and we're working on.

TIM PAUL: Yeah, so what is not far away, now far means a lot of different things in the software world, but I've seen it. I've played with it. But you'll be able to essentially store a number of different values for a tool, and then when you're in there, you'll be able to say grab the tool and then set it for a finish pass with aluminum, or maybe the next time it's a roughing pass and brass or whatever.

AUDIENCE: Are there also different tool types, like [INAUDIBLE]?

TIM PAUL: Yeah. Yeah, you can definitely define it. Right now, it doesn't drive anything, it's just more of a note for you. But general best practice, yeah, she's showing right there. General best practice and the shop that I ran last, I had the tools that I would duplicate and make for a library for brass versus aluminum, or mild steel versus invar or something. Because you're not going to use an aluminum tool the cut invar. So, does that makes sense? Because the way to manage it now is you can break it up, if you can see and turn on the samples library, Marti. Yeah, right there. So it's not spread out, but if you go up the samples has inch for brass, and those drills are actually-- the feeds and speeds on those for high speed drills are good. It comes out of my 18 years of notes and they're pretty conservative. But so for aluminum and brass, that's basically how-- the way to do it right now.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah, but yeah. That's--

TIM PAUL: It was a big focus of ours to be able to manage that better.

MARTI DEANS: OK. I don't remember what I was doing. Facing tool. Uh, yeah. Oh, I just open the tool bar. OK, cool. [INAUDIBLE] So, OK. We're back. First tab is the tool tab. Grab a tool. Feeds and speeds important from that tool. I would say the best practice for those reasons feeds and speeds is just, I like to think of them as you're utilitarian feeds and speeds. Not too fast, not too slow. I've got mostly aluminum, so all of mine are for aluminum. I'm like a Hoss, basically. And then you can always, of course, adjust it. So if I wanted to for some reason run this at a faster or slower spindle speed, I can change that there, and then for just this operation, it'll update the feeds and speeds. It will not change your tool library settings to change it in the operation.

And for facing, I'm actually just going to hit OK. And Tim says there's no stock on top, so.

TIM PAUL: So should, yeah, just one.

MARTI DEANS: It's just going to do one pass.

TIM PAUL: Flat pass, yeah.

MARTI DEANS: Because there is a model there, and it's, you know. There's something to cut, but it's just not going to maybe make any jumps.

TIM PAUL: I was joking, but yeah.

MARTI DEANS: Oh, OK.

TIM PAUL: So if she had multiple steps, it's smart enough to know I have a maximum of this much, and maybe we go out and we only have 6 inch thick material. We can tell it what the new material is, and then it would respect the multiple steps from the stock top to the model top. In this case, well, there you go.

MARTI DEANS: Now it'll do that.

TIM PAUL: Now you'll see it's still one pass, because there's no material to actually cut.

MARTI DEANS: And that's probably what this is telling me. So, OK. So that's actually a good thing to know is if something goes awry with your tool path, whether it literally can't calculate it, or if it's just a warning, it's going to give you a little yellow triangle. And then when you click on that triangle, it'll actually tell you the error message. So sometimes it-- I can't read what it says-- but sometimes it's just like a heads up. Like a, oh you're linking passes needing to be changed so that it can cut this height or whatever. Sometimes it says something like, can't generate--

TIM PAUL: Multiple depths are enabled, but the top is equal to the bottom.

MARTI DEANS: There you go.

TIM PAUL: So, there you go.

MARTI DEANS: Boom. So--

TIM PAUL: Now , full disclosure, sometimes those are pretty encryptic. You got to be creative to try to understand what it says. Sometimes it means absolutely nothing to me, but it might to a developer. So.

MARTI DEANS: Yes, sometimes they're a little unhelpful, but knowing that they're there is nice and you can read them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] significance? [INAUDIBLE]?

TIM PAUL: I strongly agree.

[LAUGHS]

And I mean, I actually, I break that all the time. But as you're learning the software, when you're facing, I always say my default behavior IS grab it with a tool and hit OK. And I'll go change what I don't like. On 3D tool paths, when you guys get into that, definitely grab a toll and hit OK. And then if something you don't like, change one thing at a time. I know it well enough.

AUDIENCE: I can't hear.

TIM PAUL: I know well enough, right? I don't actually have a lot of problems, but I save defaults, so my mine works kind of magically. But yeah, change one thing at a time. It helps you to learn it and understand it. What's up, bro?

AUDIENCE: When you said default, when you're saying default, do you mean like our basic-- when you said default for [INAUDIBLE]?

TIM PAUL: This is my favorite conversation.

MARTI DEANS: It's a great question.

TIM PAUL: So, Marti.

MARTI DEANS: Hey, this is for beginners back there.

TIM PAUL: Yeah.

MARTI DEANS: I'm just kidding. This is a great question.

TIM PAUL: But, no this is super important because I've used seven different CAM systems, and arduous? Is the right word? Like you got to--

MARTI DEANS: Yeah.

TIM PAUL: --slug through all these options and check all these boxes, and I was a power master CAM user, and just saving your default to do what you do most often, most people don't do it because they don't know how. So, if Marti goes to the passes tab and sets up. Do the expression real quick, but so the maximum step down she can set to related to the flute length of the tool, right? So, I know that hitting an insert right at the set screw is the worst thing you could do. So I go 40% or 60%, right? Now, I generally want to do that on a quarter inch insert or 3/4 inch insert. So she just typed in, tool flute length times 70%, and now, if she hits OK, she could have right clicked on that and made default. So now every time she does that, it's her default. She can also do it to the whole operation.

So every little thing she micromanaged along the way, that's her intent for what she most often does with facing, she can right click on a whole operation and go down to right around the middle it says, make default a little higher than that. Right, down, right there. So now what that's going to do, and if you're smart enough-- you think smart, right? You didn't just put in what I call a dumb number of 100 thou, because if you relate it to your flute length, it'll change with your flute length. What if she gives me the job and I go out, and I was like, oh, I only have that ASX. I don't have that whatever, . She can just change the tool, regenerate it, and now I go from 100 thou step over to step down to 150.

So, does that answer that question? And that's honestly the reason I-- when I was at L3, I could have bought any, I could have bought Power Mill, I could have bought anything I wanted. And the reason I bought HSN is because it was super easy to make parts and it was super efficient. Once you kind of get going, you can really get it to adapt what you do most. So, that's that.

Oh, Can you-- sorry-- can you go to the setup and add more stock to it?

MARTI DEANS: Yeah, I can add some stock to the top.

TIM PAUL: So, if she goes to the stock and now it changes the z to three inches. Because I came back and told her, sorry I only had three in stock. Now when she regenerates that.

MARTI DEANS: Hold on.

TIM PAUL: Give her some--

MARTI DEANS: I can't see anything, sorry.

TIM PAUL: --flexibility. Some forgiveness. So you can see it automatically added steps. I could have said, no I actually only have 12 inch stock, and it would do the same thing. What you. Did that automatically regenerate?

MARTI DEANS: No.

TIM PAUL: OK. So what we didn't talk about, is you would have seen a red exclamation point because the tool path became what I call dirty and it needs to regenerate. So something that drove the path changed. Same thing with the parametric CAD/CAM environment. If she goes out and changes the bore of that hole, you'll get everything turns red, because something changed that drove the tool path. You just right click on it and regenerate tool path.

MARTI DEANS: I'm on the set, but--

TIM PAUL: Yeah.

MARTI DEANS: --you can also right click on the setup and generate tool paths and then it'll do all the tool paths in the setup. So if you've done like, 30 tool paths or whenever, you don't have to click all of them individually. So we're actually going to post this code right now, because it's a little bit easier to look at it when there's just one facing operation in there. It's a little more readable. OK, so here's my dialog box. So, our [INAUDIBLE] is pretty good, but we have over 100 built in. So these always come free, they come when you install Fusion, they're always there, and there's pretty good support for most stuff. So there's definitely one for shopbot in there. There's the big names are all in there.

TIM PAUL: A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff.

MARTI DEANS: I'm going to pick the post that I want and it's already selected right there.

TIM PAUL: It's already there. So the only think I'll add to that is the link on the bottom left of that window is where you could go to our post library online and search for whatever you have if it's not on that list.

MARTI DEANS: I don't have internet, so. You'll have to do that later, but yeah. So you can search for things that aren't built in or there's special like machine specific builds if you guys have not just a Hos, but you have an ST10Y. There's a post specifically for that machine that just runs a little bit better. Do, like, CAM cycles and stuff.

So, in here, this is my second chance to name my program and then put in some kind of a comment. So the comment will show up in the first couple of lines of code if I want to have one of those. Then I can also set a bunch of post options just right here. So without having to go in and open up the post file and edit it, which is difficult, I can set certain settings. I can't read any of them, so I'm not going to do it, but I can set some settings just right there and it will highlight things that I change. Right, sure. So if I change something, it's now blue and much bolder, so I can see that it's not the default setting. And then if I change it back, it just goes back to looking like the default. So I'm--

TIM PAUL: This is where you can tell it post n numbers to your code, you can say only do every 10 numbers, you know there's all kinds of options. Pre-stage tool. A lot of stuff you used to have your hard coded into your post-processor, you can do in here.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah, pre-load tool. All that stuff. So, I'm going to hit Post, and then it's going to last chance to rename my, there's three chances to rename my post file. This is the last one. And then it's going to save it in some default folder. But I can, of course, save it wherever I want. And then I'm just going to place it. And then it's going to open up in brackets, which is an open source, I think it's Adobe. Just a text editor. Mine is colorful because I got really annoyed with it being black and white, so I wrote an extension that you can use to color your g-code. So it's called template-- it's the longest title ever for something that literally just adds colors. But if use search my name or if use search,

TIM PAUL: Wow.

MARTI DEANS: I think it's like only g-code syntax highlighter in there. So if use search for any of that, it will show up, you can install it and it adds nice colors to your g-code. So here's our code.

TIM PAUL: What are those colors Martie?

MARTI DEANS: Oh man. It's blue for g-codes, red for m-codes, feeds and speeds are purple, and then something's yellow.

TIM PAUL: Yeah. Yeah, so you'll figure it out pretty quick. The blues is, you know, I guess it would be--

MARTI DEANS: Oh, you were asking a very different question than I was answering.

TIM PAUL: --and what not, so. Yeah, it breaks it down logically.

MARTI DEANS: Yeah. So, you don't have to know how to read g-code at all to be able to run this. I like to look at it. That's why I do this and show this, is because I like to just take a look and make sure that it's calling up the tool that I expected it to call up first, the very first thing on there is a facing operation. That's good. That's what I would expect to happen. So, when I put it on the machine, I'm just-- I know that at least the first couple of things are going to go OK.