Post Processor help

[dblcrona]

We use Pro/NC to create our milling sequences for our NC machines. In Pro/NC you create a "workcenter" that defines your machine and its tools and which tool pocket they reside in. This works great except for in the case of our KIWA mill which I am creating a workcenter for right now. The problem is that this machine has a tool holder that holds 16 tools but we have about 150 tools that we use on this machine. Therefore when an operator has a job to run, he figures our what tools he needs and puts them in in the order they are needed. This means that the forst tool called out in the program gets put in position one and so on. Since Pro/NC requires that all tools receive a unique position number I would like to modify my post processor to change my tool position numbers for me. For example, my toos according to Pro/NC might be #12, #2, #5, #16. I would like the post processor to change these numbers to 1, 2, 3, 4. Is this possible?

Ken Johnson
ITT Industries, Engineered Process Solutions Group

 

[jbel]

Ken,

I'm not too farmiliar with Pro/NC but you might try to post this on

http://www.cnczone.com

. They probably have a better audience for this type of question.

 

[brianfrancis]

Ken,

If you are using Pro/NCPOST, you can the tool change format as a "pocket" type in the post processor, with a maximum of 16 pockets. Change the LOADTL commands generated by Pro/NC to follow this format:

LOADTL/

tool_id

,IN,AUTO,

...

The IN,AUTO tells Pro/NCPOST to choose the pocket automatically. You can instead change the default behavior of the post processor to always choose pockets automaticall (you do this in the Tool Change Startup macro).

If pocket information is not preloaded (via TOOLNO commands), then Pro/NCPOST will choose pockets in sequence starting from 1. If you reuse a tool number, Pro/NCPOST will reuse the corresponding pocket number. The tooling summary at the end of the operator listing can be used by the operator to assign tools to their proper pockets.

Brian.
ICAM

 

[pascual]

I use Pro/NC and I have a machining drawing. I give this drawing to the operator containing the tools. The drawing has a table that automatically contains the tool name and number so he puts the tools in the correct order