Using FreeCAD Path - 3 (Visualization)

[Music] everybody welcome back to our tutorial series on using the pre cad path workbench in this video video number 3 I'm going to be talking about the visualization and simulation tools these are tools that we have for exploring and understanding the paths that we create so that we can find errors early so let's go ahead and jump in but before we do I'm going to talk a little bit about the view itself and understanding what we're seeing on this screen what I have on my screen is a sample project that has a job with three operations configured a drilling pocket and a contour what they have in common is the way that they're represented on the screen in all cases a green line indicates a feed move where the cutter is engaged with the material and a red line indicates a rapid move where the cutter is above the material and just repositioning from one place to another if I hover over one of these lines you'll see that a blue cone is added to indicate the direction of travel in this case in my contour the cutter is moving in a clockwise manner around the part at the same time the status line gives me some details about the selected segments in this case it's a g1 move and the XY and z coordinates follow the number 13 is the index of this command within the operation so this is the 13th move within the contour operation if you remember in other parts of free CAD you can select an object and press the spacebar to toggle the visibility I'll turn off my body objects so we can focus on the path segments however if I selected a job and press the spacebar there's very little change if I select the drilling operation there's no change at all and likewise with pocket no change at all what's happening is that these operations have their own visibility that's different from the visibility of the job that contains them so the jobs view is sort of a composite of all of the underlying objects to completely hide things you'd have to turn off the job and then turn off each of the operations now looking at G codes one at a time when the status line isn't very efficient and so we have an inspection tool that allows us to look at the complete output of an operation if I select the contour operation and click on the inspect it'll bring up a dialog box that I can see all of the G code at once if I highlight one of the commands in this list the corresponding segments in the 3d view is highlighted in fact you can select multiple and create a kind of an animation effect showing the process of the cutter moving around the material inspection gives us a good idea what's happening with the G code but it doesn't tell us much about what the final product will look like or how the cut will proceed for that we have a simulator tool select the simulator tool and you'll see that the stock material is added to the 3d view along with a representation of the tool in the task panel you can select and deselect individual operations to be included in the simulation speed controls how fast the cutter appears to move and won't reflect the actual output as configured in the g-code simulation can be very processor intensive and if you're at a point one percent accuracy it can bog down even a multi-core machine I recommend dialing this back to point four or greater these buttons control the actual simulation click on the play to see it if I click cancel at this point the stock material the cutter and everything else will be deleted from the view and I'll be returned back to my starting condition however if I say ok and scroll down the list you'll see that a new cut material part was added to the document this is a mesh object and it represents the material as it was left over we can do some interesting things with it and we might look at that in a later video for now you can just select the cut material and click delete path has one more set of tools that can be used to explore the result of your operations they're a little bit obscure but they can be useful in a number of situations like other things that are shown in the 3d window our operations have a view provider and the view provider properties can be changed by clicking on this tab if I select the contour object and switch to the View tab you'll see a number of properties related to the line width and color that adjusts the color of the actual segments and you can adjust it to your preference this is very similar to other parts of free CAD however there are properties here that are unique to paths for instance show nodes if I select the contour and turn the nodes on you'll see that a number of markers have been added to the start and end of each segment if I turn off my body object again you'll see that markers have also been added to the center point of each arc in g-code the center coordinates of an arc are an offset from one end of the arc so it's a little bit troublesome if you wanted to calculate the exact position with the nodes turned on you can hover over this position and the coordinates will be shown on the status line showing nodes has one other application that can be useful if a drilling operation is set up to do Peck drilling as this one is turning on the nodes will show you exactly where the cutter will peck at each step down also in the view provider our two properties show count and show index these control how much of the path is actually rendered on the screen turning my attention to the pocket operation that I created mine is fairly simple but you can imagine a pocket operation getting very dense with a lot of steps down and a really and and lines very tight and close together it can be hard to visualize exactly what's happening if show count is set to zero then all parts of the path are rendered but you can change this day and the other number if I set it to ten only the first 10 moves are shown including the rapid move start index controls which 10 moves are shown this is the first 10 moves starting at 0 but if I set this to 10 it'll be the 10 moves starting at move number 10 well that's it for the simulation and inspection tools I hope you found this helpful if you did or didn't please offer a comment below in the next video we'll get into some of the details of creating and configuring the operations and until then thanks for watching

Channel: sliptonic

Views: 12,533

Keywords: cnc, version 17, visualization, CNC, FreeCAD, 0.17, Path, simulation, CAM, freecad, open source cam

Id: fWU621P0gZk

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 10 2018