Using Fusion 360 to make a tool path for a ShopBot

this video is just on how to make a tool path for your CNC to cut the the birdhouse before we get started I previously used V carve Pro instead of fusion 360 and I just want to address some of the differences in fusion 360 we cannot handle large numbers of s large STL files to have more than 30 to 50,000 triangles fusion 360 will just choke and die on those kind of numbers and V carve Pro there seems to be no limits I've found I've cut landscapes that had millions of triangles in them it looks much better if I do it with the car Pro also fusion 360 cannot handle large DXF and SVG files if you have very complicated geometry and a lot of it fusion 360 may not be able to function for you however on the plus side fusion 360 isn't basically free for students and teachers and things so it's much more accessible via carve Pro is quite expensive the simulator in fusion 360 is vastly superior to the carve pro and so let's get started so the first thing to do is to insert our DXF file from the previous class I have to put it in a plane so this is the XY plane and you see this green red green red YX I'm gonna select that plane be nice if we put the X and the y on here now I'm going to select the file open and there it is and just use the other second okay now I'm going to orient head-on and I want this viewed to be not my front but my top so I'm gonna set the current view as top and now we see in our cube we have top here okay so now what I'm gonna do is extrude all these faces profiles I mean in two bodies I'm going to extrude them to a depth of 0.2 height to 0.236 because that is the thickness of the material that I have measured so this this oops let me hit the extrude button first and I'm going extrude this in this this this this this over here these windowsills I'm gonna cue them like so distance of point two three six and all two new body just do it all in one step now we have bodies instead of a DXF file to work with the next thing i want to do is dog bone these corners so that my bit will carve out these corners completely so that everything will fit well in dog boning in fusion 360 most people use this add-in so over here we have our add-ins menu and we can get our add-ins and I already have the dog bone script in here under add-ins or I'll show you how to add it right now go google dog bone script fusion 360 and you'll get right to this web URL here this is github which may already be familiar with then come over here and select download and then download the zip file comes down really fast because it's not that big when you get it you want to drop it in this folder here type in % AppData % autodesk autodesk fusion 360 guys slash add-ins we get there I've already dropped the script in but just drop the folder and just as you downloaded it take it out of the zip file first it'll have these files in it once you've done that then just simply go over to add-ins script add-ins these are our add-ins you'll see I already have dog bone in here you won't have that yet you'll have to click this and then select this file select the folder and whoops now I got two of them so once we have that dog bone script we hit the Run button this doesn't run the script watch what happens I hit run and Bing I get a new button this new button will run the script I click on that and and let's get to work so the tool diameter I'm using is an eighth inch bit I'm gonna output unconstrained geometry because I have no constraints here I just imported this file so it'll run much faster that way and now I can select entire bodies for dog boning and it will pick up all the corners but I can only do these ones I've selected here the reason is that these windows I don't want them dog bones if I do we'll probably lose some of this window framing here will just fall apart because the dog boning will be too much so I don't want to do these at all so these I'll do later I'm gonna do these four bodies in one step so I just hit OK and just takes a couple of seconds and look at that it's nicely dog bones so we can dig out those corners great little script now something to point out is suppose I wanted to undo that dog boning well every time you run the dog going script you get a new sketch if I wanted to undo that although I'd have to do is delete this sketch and it would reverse everything I've done or you could just roll your timeline back well actually it doesn't show up in the timeline because we're operating I don't know why it doesn't show up in the timeline but if you want to undo a dog bone operation just delete the sketch that it created all right let's take care of the other bodies now so I still got the tool diameter 0.125 and I'm going to in this stead of selecting bodies I'm going to select the interior edges so let me get it a little bit better angle and then start hitting all the edges that I want dog bone pretty much like this if I hit something that I didn't want dog bones I can hold down the shift key and click again and undo that operation all right so this body is now going to be dog boned I'll just press okay and there we go you see the dog bones right here didn't touch my windows all right I'm gonna pause for a second and do the rest of them to speed things up okay I just finished running my dog bone script a couple more times to get everything else needed I'm gonna reorient this to the home position I'm going to change this home position to be you know I kind of like that so I'll just right-click here set the current view set the current view home there we go so now the next time I click on home I'll get right to that view alright so now let's move off into our cam environment so we're done modeling let's go to cam the first thing to do is create a set up the set up describes the stock material that we're going to cut and our axis so I'll create a new set up right here and so the first thing to do is set our our axis oh I don't want to cut from the middle I want to cut from the lower left-hand corner and I want to set my z-axis from the top of the material so I'll just click there and that's the simplest way of doing it that's because I'm using model orientations so I'll have the same axis as the model that I created alls I had to do was move this around by clicking on these points if I wanted to reverse something all's I have to do is click on this arrow and it will reverse there's other ways of doing this I prefer the model orientation but you can select your axis many different ways we just won't get into that right now the next thing is we have to describe the dimensions of the stock we're going to cut so I'll hit the stock button and it gives us a default sizes I don't prefer that I like a fixed box size I've measured the material I'm going to cut it's 18 inches by 18 inches by 0.236 it okay and that's my pieces that will come out of my stock all right next up is we need to describe a bit to cut this with I have a 1/8 inch man a bit now which we're going to be describing in just a minute I'll put it into a custom library so I'll create a new library called demo just for the purposes of showing you how to create a library and put your bits in it bits also reference its holder so you have to do the holder first the holder is what I usually call the call it in the collet nut so the first thing let's go over to tool library I'll click on that I'm going to come over to local and create a new tool library I'll call it you to demo alright and that will be say your personal library for all your bits the next thing to do is add a holder so this is new holders this is new bits so I'll start with a new holder let's give it a little description shop font desk top nut bender I bought it from shop bot the product ID I just call an ER 20 that's the size of the nut I do recommend you put in links to wherever you bought it it's kind of handy if you need another one it's a good place to keep that information next we have to describe our shop but nut well the shop but nut has a very simple geometry we only need to add two different heights here the first one the height will be 0.65 five the diameter will be one point three nine and that's the upper diameter the lower diameter will be the same I'm sorry yeah point one point three nine now the the next diameter is going to be point one seven one one point three nine and one point one one four and that is our shopbot nut okay so if I wanted to just change things up a little bit let me just show you how this works I can change this height you can kind of see how this is going so section one is this section here if I wanted to change narrow this down I would probably go to the lower diameter say my five so it's it's kind of self-explanatory put it back I recommend just plain with it in about five minutes you'll have it down you'll never forget it so that's my holder I'll click okay next let's go over some of the terminology before we go ahead and make our bit so this is a picture of a bit we have the overall length from here to here at the flute length is just the cutting edge diameter so in this case this this bit has a rather short one the shoulder length is from the very tip to where it changes diameter so if your bit only has one diameter this measurements is kind of unimportant and just long as it's inside the overall length it won't make any difference another measurement is how much your bit sticks out of the holder so if if the nut was right here this would be the body length the reason why we we put in the body length I think is for collision detection so you can make sure that the the holder nut won't actually collide into your material at any point by using the simulation which we'll get to later also diameter refers to the cutting edge diameter and the shaft diameter is the diameter that goes into the holder once again if your bit is has a single diameter then both of these values will be the same now let's add our first bit our only bit for this project to our library so we're going to add a new mill tool and before I get started here I just want to point out that you can go into this library tree and find all kinds of bits from different manufacturers let's go over here and select all so it might be more convenient for you to just select somebody else's in mill and then change it into what you need to speed things up but for the purposes of what we're doing we're going to create our own bit so let me go back now create a new bit so we'll start with cutter so in this case we're not going to use coolant our units will be inches expand this out a little bit there we go some of the important things we need to watch out for is the number of flutes you're using two flutes here and I am using an Amana 1/8 and mil the bender as Amazon I guess product ID is 45 200 I bought this bit for just 13 bucks on Amazon it cuts really well the flute is neither up nor down it's a straight flute which works well for plywood in that it doesn't compact the bits the chips too much it doesn't extract them real great either but it doesn't pull the material up off this boiler board the diameters 0.125 shaft diameter is 0.25 the flute length is 0.4 375 shoulder length says the 0.4 375 all these values I just measured them with my calipers the overall body length remember that's just the mount that sticks out of the holder one-inch will stick out and then the overall length will be 2 inches okay so that's a good representation of our bit however what is this crazy holder well we need to go to the holder we just made and go select a holder let's scroll to the bottom there's our shopbot holder that we just made and now we see it looks a little bit more realistic now with our bits we can save our preferred thieves and speeds with with them which I like a lot so you might make a copy of this bit for every speed rate that you tend to work with I've been working with switch the feeds of speeds 1200 rpm I'll pause here will I fill in a few more items actually let's not pause I'm going to set in the chip rate of point zero zero three and you notice it calculates our feed rate for us so that's our cutting feed rate it's based off of our speed and our chip rate if I were to change this value here for spindle speed it will actually change our chip rate they call it feed per tooth and I call it chip rate I don't really like that because this is a fixed number for a bit so normally I would change this or this if I change this I'd expect it to change my cutting feed rate but that's not how it works so lead in lead out and ramps I always use 75% of the cutting speed so I can actually type in 72 times 0.75 and use that and you see it just fills in the 54 that's nice so I can do math in these little text boxes and I'm also gonna set that as my plunge rate to now notice that if I set this talk text box it'll change this one and if I change this one it'll will set this one for me so whichever one I put a value in it will change the opposite one so I'll just paste and you see that the feed per revolution just updated okay and that's all we need for bits let's go ahead and save that close our library and now we're going to go ahead and start with contour cuts so I want to cut these parts out and I need tabs to hold the material down so that's we're going to use a 2d cut these are your available 2d cuts just want to give a point out to this trace here in trace we're not going to use it it is useful in that if you have a line anywhere in 3d and your your drawing you can make the bit follow that line and I use that for stick fonts fonts that have no thickness and I can make the bit follow that stick font yeah using this trace command kind of cool we're going to use a contour and we're going to go around these edges so the first thing to do is select our bit we're gonna go through all these tabs so the first tab select the bit there's our bit okay as soon as we select the bit our feeds and speeds are all set up for us very nice now we got to select what we want to cut so we'll go to geometry and I'm gonna start selecting the tops of everything that I want to cut with the profile I need to get the inside and outside of these something I want to point out is these are all climb cuts if you wanted to switch to a conventional cut which just basically means go the opposite direction you can hit these arrows okay and they'll reverse for you next thing I want to do is add my tabs it will automatically add tabs for us if we want however I don't prefer its selection I'm going to make my tablet my tab height a little higher also I'm going to not do it by distance but I'm gonna do it myself so I'm gonna say at points and now I'm going to select where I want the tabs now if I want to remove one of these tabs or move it I can just slide it around but note that it will not go around corners or at least not around sharp corners if I want to remove a tab I just simply hold the shift key and then click on it again I'll put these tabs down put one here one here slide this guy over a little bit all right and I will pause while I do the rest of these okay I'm back and this is the real reason I wanted to do the tabs myself is to take care of these very thin fragile parts I wanted to make sure I got enough tabs on the inside as well as the outside and roughly about where I wanted them and this circle here he's kind of problematic so I'm gonna put two tabs opposite each other there and two opposite each other there okay so that's all my tabs I think I'll just move this guy to the center real quick okay all right we're just about done let me explain why we're skipping some of these stock contours is is used limit machining areas which we don't need rest machining that is a really really cool feature so what rest machining does we're not going to use it but keep it in mind is that if you want to cut with a larger bit and then finish it off with a smaller bit you use rest machining that's what rest means do the rest and it will only cut the areas that were not cut by the larger bit wrap tool path and tool orientation is for CNC machines that have more than three axes which we do not have at the lab the next thing take care of is the heights so I like to think in terms of my stock material so these are all the different and these are measure from I want to measure from the stock bottom for at the bottom I want to measure from the stock top for the top of the cut feed height is the height where we would start to ramp into our cut I'm going to also measure that from stock top and so let me go back down to the bottom I want to cut into my spoiler board just a little bit so I'll set it to minus 0.02 inches stock top I'm going to do a little bit of a trick here where I'm going to start cutting point zero eight above the top of the stock and what that'll do is my step downs are going to be we haven't set that yet but they're going to be point one inch so on the very first cut by setting it a little bit above the material here we will just kind of lightly cut into the material and this will help prevent splintering in our plywood so cutting plywood on a shop bot requires a little extra work the feed height is where we start to ramp in that's fine the retract height I'll make that a little taller just so I'm certain it clears everything it doesn't take much longer to go a little higher and retract height that's where we how high we go when we're done machining a single tool path all right on to the next tab we go from Heights to passes so passes this is mostly for finishing passes which we're not going to do with our birdhouse but we are going to do roughing passes so this is where we set our maximum step over so the step over is going to be our tool diameter which is 0.125 times 0.4 so I like to cut into the material 0.4 for each step over now you can type in point one two five times 0.4 you can even do this tool diameter times 0.4 and it will take that moving down multiple depths yeah we need multiple depths we don't want to cut this deep wood on a just single pass so I like to step the tool down 80% of the total diameter so the maximum roughing step down will be tool diameter times 0.8 or you could just type in the value yourself if you want to calculate it on a calculator sometimes I will use this order by depth and what that'll do is it will cut one pass on this contour and then it'll go the next one and I'll cut another pass and then I'll cut this path and tell every one of these cuts have reached the same depth then they'll come back to this first one and then it will cut down again to the next step the next step the next step and the reason why I do that sometimes is it gives me a good chance to somewhere in the middle pause the Machine and get the vacuum cleaner and suck the chips out of the channels however it does incur kind of a time penalty so you might not want to do that the next one we're going to look at is stock to leaf so a stock to leave is how much material we would leave and we have two values one is the radial stock to leave which is how much material around the bet we're going to leave this is a XY kind of this axial stock to leave is like a z-value of material leaf so I don't want to change this so that'll be zero but I want to actually cut into the material a little deeper than the plan would normally cut for by a very small amount minus 0.2 0.0 5 the reason for that is to leave a little bit of room so things fit nicely and there's room for glue smoothing is some optimization stuff we're not going to get into feed optimizations is of course other optimization stuff of mostly how do I go around corners we don't really care we'll just take the defaults and now for our final tab linking now this first area is for things like rapid movements we'll just use our defaults Whedon's and transitions I don't care too much about this this isn't fine furniture so I'll use defaults ramps I do kind of care about they have a very low angle ramp as a default perhaps because people use that for machining aluminum but I'm going to steep in that angle to 15 degrees I'm also going to not limit the maximum the rate at which the ramp can step down so I'm just going to increase that value to make sure it ends up as 15 degrees and now we get to hit the ok button and seed the tool path a few seconds of calculation and there it is and let's take a look at it looks about what I was expecting we can see our tabs here also we can see our ramp downs here I always do this I'll click on the front just to verify how much I'm cutting into the spoiler board just that's my point zero two that I'm cutting down and just kind of check that I clear everything in my ramps all look good okay well I want to create a second tool path because we ignored these holes I don't want to cut those out with a contour i I want to cut them out with pockets so I'm just gonna mill it all out so the next cut I'm going to create is a pocket 2d pocket and now I'm going to select what all is going to get pocketed so if I click on this we see our cut here the area in blue is what's going to get cut out if I hit this arrow it will reverse and I'll cut everything but that area I selected so I'm going to select all the little window stuff these holes for the tabs and these windows here okay I should point out that it automatically selected the previous bit for me and then moved me to this second tab here if I needed a different bit for this just hit the select button so that takes care of that takes care of this tab again the rest machining is to change bits to narrow smaller diameter bits and just machine the parts that were left by the larger bits very handy these are for multi access machines and stock contours is for limiting our cut area in which we're not going to do so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit because the heights and the passes are going to be just the same as in the previous cut the contours so I'll pause and set those up well actually one thing that is different is I'm not going to have any stock to leaf so this and this other than that these two tabs are the same now let's go to linking okay so this is the linking tab we don't want to adjust any of these rapid movements we don't want to adjust any of the lead ins or transitions the ramp we're going to use a helix type there's many to select from we're gonna increase this angle to 15 degrees and make sure that our maximum step-down doesn't slow anything up and that's pretty much it so I'll click OK and it'll calculate and it happens very fast and now we can see our helix coming in oops I forgot to set multiple Heights pausing again okay well I can fix that by right-clicking on this pocket and saying clicking selecting edit there we go and that was passes I should have had multiple passes I forgot that [Music] the maximum step-down is the bit diameter times 80% let's click OK recalculating that looks better okay so now that's our pockets if we want to see all the tool paths at once we can click on this and this so you have to hold the shift key in order to do that so the next step is to run the simulator so this is the runs simulate button I'll click on that so just to start out with I do want to see my stock so I'll check that now I can see my stock I will make it semi-transparent and for I don't want to see this nut here so I'll go over to tool and I'll take off holder and just show flute so it's not blocking a lot of information for me and you know I can go ahead and hit the Run button and then we see our bit cutting away if I want to speed that up I can just slide this over that's pretty nice now if I want to go backwards I can just reverse this timeline and you'll notice the bits going backwards and unwinding everything it's done pretty cool if I want to go to the very next operation I can click on this and I'll just simply finish up that previous operation we can see that we've cut our contours through if I want to finish everything all at once I can just click this the simulator is very very fast and I like the simulator a lot so just we'll just take a look at this make sure that everything looks ok I'll take those toolpaths off just so I can kind of see the cut a little better now you can see through the stock material and actually see my model if I didn't want to see the model I can go back to model and just unclick view bodies and then go back to the cam simulation I have to select my tool pass and REE simulate and we'll do this real fast and there we go pretty nice in this case I might want to take off the transparent and select something that's not so shiny so I'll just take wall paint and just kind of look everything over the tabs look okay they look tall enough so everything should be fine so the next step is to create our tool pathing so this is the post process button I'm going to put both of these tool paths into one file if I didn't want to do that I would just select one and hit the pros post process button if I want both of them or any number of them I just select them before I hit post process this folder here don't worry about it where I want the output to go I'll have mine go to just the desktop I guess the program the name of this tool path will be I don't care birdhouse and I need to select what type of CNC device I'm using so for the shopbot I use this open shopbot selection it'll work with I guess all the shop bots it'll work with the desktop the Alpha whatever if you have a different device or just a different card so using the tiny-g card you just select it right there and then in post and let me change that to the desktop there we go and hit safe and so that's pretty much it the next step would just be to save your project and we went over this with the first class and that pretty much covers it thanks for watching my video that concludes this video

Channel: Jim Yost

Views: 17,236

Keywords: CNC, CAM, Fusion 360, ShopBot, Tool Path

Id: v_bM2nY9aD8

Length: 41min 21sec (2481 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2017