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So in this first video we're going to be covering a very simple 2D contour, we'll be progressing through the different contouring options in varying degrees of complexity as we go forward. But for this instance it's very basic, very easy and shouldn't require too much thinking power really. So we're going to go to add operation and then 2D and then click on 2D contouring. The first thing I want to define is I want to define a longer cutting tool than we've got because realistically this is not a tool length that I would use for this sort of thing, especially not with the size of the object that we've got in the middle.

So I'm going to define this tool length as 300mm because presuming I'm working in a foam cutting environment that's a perfectly normal sort of tool length to work with and that is my background after all. Obviously the considerations are different for different material types but for the sake of expedience I shall work with what I know best. So we are now going to go to job assignment to define the curve that we're interested in which is this curve here and we're going to click on curve to assign that and you can see now how we've got this nice green work zone here. which tells us that it's not only picked the curve quite nicely but also that it's expecting to machine all the way down here which is not really what we're after.

So we're going to go to strategy and I don't want it to cut 360mm of material, I would like it to cut much less. So I'm going to set the top level to 100mm and the bottom level to 75mm and that should be absolutely fine for our needs so I'm going to click on generate toolpath. and we don't have anything generated so far which is not ideal. So the first thing to do would be to check the axis map tool and before we do that actually one of the primary things we need to do is enable move up in E3 because if the robot cannot reach the workpiece.

then it can't do much with it. So I'm now going to click on generate toolpath again and I'm now going to click on axis map and take a look at what we've got and we can see we've got an out of limits issue straight off the bat. That's fine, it's not insurmountable because it doesn't cover the entire range, it's only sat directly on 0 degrees of deflection across axis A6, not an issue. I'm also going to check for collisions now, just better to be safe than sorry and we can see we're nice and clear and free and easy of those so I shall click on build graph and then update toolpath.

and we can now see how we've got a nice link and lead entry there. So I'm going to slowly pan through this, make sure that everything is as expected and it's looking good to me. So I'm happy to call that toolpath good so click on update toolpath again, close that and we've got a red node here which I believe is probably from the first instance. So if we click on simulation now and we right click on here and reset the node status and we do that on the root node as well and then we click on run just.

so it simulates we should see nice clean green node statuses which is perfect. So that is basically about as simple as robot machining gets. We've got a nice 2D contour toolpath there, does exactly what it says on the tin. The next video is going to cover 3D contouring and then the final video in this mini series is going to cover 5D contouring, well it's called 6D contouring now but it's nominally following a 5 axis path which I'll see you in the next one.