Richard Stubley
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
We partner closely with Haas Automation to reduce the pain of getting set up with your Haas machine and Fusion 360. Take a look at the following tips to make quality parts faster with Fusion 360 and your Haas machines.
Nothing is more frustrating than balancing the time between optimizing programs and getting your machines running. In a perfect world, you’d minimize every retract trim every second of air cutting. You’d also likely do some fancy calculation on the benefits of an extra tool change for a dedicated tool.
No one wants to run an inefficient program or see a machine standing waiting for a program. Take a look at these tips to work smarter and not harder with Fusion 360 and your Haas Machine.
Probing & Inspection
If you have a spindle-mounted probe on your Haas CNC machine, then why not use it to its full potential?
In Fusion 360, you can use your probe to set your WCS and for in-process inspection. Using probe geometry, you can probe machined features then perform actions based on the results. These actions can be as simple as alarming the machine when the feature size or position is out of tolerance. You can also use the probe to inspect the component mid-cycle and update tool wear to catch variation.
Fusion 360 helps reduce complexity when programming your probe. It also offers additional functionality such as completely removing the need for manual setup. You achieve this by using “override driving WCS” in Fusion 360. We use two datums on the machine tool. A static datum that never changes and a part datum that updates with each component. If you have a static point on your machine tool, wave goodbye to costly manual setup times and keep your machine running.
To find out more on how to use override Driving WCS, see, take a look at this tutorial.
Smoothing
When it comes to surface finish, we could be debating strategies and cutting parameters all day long. However, there are other ways to improve the surface finish from a software standpoint. Software smoothing is achieved by optimizing the machine motion to provide smother axis transitions over your parts. There are two places where we can apply smoothing. The first is in Fusion 360 itself. Toolpaths such as steep and shallow allow you to apply smoothing to the toolpath. A trick to see the smoothing effects is to turn on the point display; you can see the difference when we have “evenly spaced points” activated. Note: The point display is on the navigation toolbar.
Another way of applying smoothing is via settings on your HAAS machine tool. Setting 191 on your machine controls the default smoothness of your axis movements. Here you can adjust the smoothness. Be aware turning it up to its finest level of control will increase machining times.
Working Collaboratively – Sharing your Tool Library
We all want to spend less time setting up a job and more time making parts. Ensuring the right tools are in the carousel can be a large portion of the setup time. With our HAAS VF2, we used to spend far too long loading a 10mm end mill in the machine, only to find another already loaded in the machine that we could have used instead. Enter the use of cloud tool libraries. Now we all have access to the latest list of what tools are actually in the machine. Thus, significantly reducing programming and setup times.
So how do you and your team work off of cloud tool libraries? First, click on your user in the top right and then preferences. Now navigate to the manufacture page and ensure “enable cloud libraries” is active. You should now see a new section in your tool library called “cloud. This gives anyone working in your Fusion team access to the latest tool library. So you can spend less time setting up and more time running parts. Did you know you can also do the same with post processors in the assets folder in your data panel?
Check out Tips for using Fusion 360 with Haas Machines – Pt. 1 for more.
Ready to get started? Achieve faster integration for your Haas Automation CNC machine with Fusion 360.
