4D Surfacing Operations is part of 4D Rotary Machining with Robots. Sign in with your ENCY account to access lessons, assignments and progress tracking.
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Alright, so in this last video we're going to have a look at not only at the 4D surfacing but we're also going to introduce a couple of new techniques as well. So first things first, we're going to go back into the machining space and I'm going to disable this rotary finishing pass. We've proven that it works, that's all great, but we're doing something a bit more interesting now. So we right click and we disable that, and for now I'm going to add an operation.
So we're going to go to 4D rotary and we're going to add a 4D surfacing operation. So again, as with all previous iterations, we need to do the basic setup first. So the tool orientation is front, that's fine, the rotary turntable vector is going to be positive X, and we need to turn on move up E3 and rotate E2. Now we need to go into job assignment at this point and we need to define which of these surfaces we're going to work on first.
So I would like to work on this interior curved plane. So I'm going to click on that as machining surface, I'm going to choose the boundary curve here as the first curve, and this other boundary curve here as the second curve. So this defines the space that we're going to be operating within. Now we need to take a look at the strategy that we're going to be machining with.
So we go into the strategy tab and first thing that we need to do is we need to define the rotary axis. So that's going to be the WCSZ. The second thing that we want to do is we want to take a look at the strategy. So ideally I would say we either need to go across curve or morph between two curves for Now for the sake of this groove I quite like the idea of going across the curve.
So by doing so we should see that this path now comes in at 90 degrees compared to this curve. So we can also do a couple of tricks as well with this because we can see that this path terminates just inside the edge of the curve, which means that we might not get perfect coverage of all of this section of the curve here. So what we can do is by scrolling a little bit further down in the strategy tab, we can extend and trim passes. Now I'm going to add 25% at the start and 25% at the end, which will increase the length of these passes by 4mm on each end.
So if we regenerate this now, we see that's coming in a little bit longer and it's coming in a little bit closer to the edge. We can do that further, if anything, let's try it, let's put it up to 50 and 50 and we regenerate once again and you can see just how much that's now exceeding that by. And that should give us a nice clean definition of that internal curve, preferably without affecting this flat too much. So for the sake of this, I'm going to now run this through the simulation and take a look at how it comes out.
So however, first let's just check for links and leads. We've still got the inherited avoid collisions. That's great. Let's take a look.
So we're going to reset. We are going to calculate up to this current operation. So that's just the roughed out cylinder there. And I'm going to slow this down a little bit so we can actually see what's going on.
And then we're going to run. And you can see now how it's coming in already. And this line here describes the edge of that curved area that we want. So we're now getting that nice sweep across there and everything's looking pretty good.
So we're going to let this run through to completion and then we're going to take a look at what we want to do about the other flatter surrounding surface. So we go back to machining now and I'm going to cheat. Might as well. We've got these tools for our convenience.
So let's use them for our convenience. So I'm going to duplicate this operation. And in doing so, I'm just going to change what the target surface is. So we see it starts here and then continues up and it finishes out the right hand side.
Okay, that's fine. So that means that we're going to target this surface here. Okay, sorry. Let me just bring the camera back into a cleaner view.
So we are going to delete that machining surface and we're going to select this one. And we do the same with the first curve. And the reason I've done that is just so I've got a nice clean datum as to which one's which. Obviously you work in your own intent with that.
It's just occurred to me that I've gone and edited the original, not the clone. That's not a problem. We've got both of these at our disposal now. So I'm just going to drag this down here.
So it's the second operation. The next thing that I'd like to do is instead of a cross curve, I would like to morph between two curves. So this means that the actual cutting operation will be going vertically relative to the actual object and it will be operating between those two curves as the constraints there. So morph between two curves.
The rest of that looks good. We don't really need to extend the paths, but we might as well leave those settings in there. And I'm going to recalculate this one. And we can see here how we've got that nice followed contour there that corresponds perfectly with the edge and goes all the way across it.
I'm also going to recalculate this one since I messed that up a tiny bit. But once that's done, we can then happily simulate the two and see how it looks. Now we do have, oh, that's a bit interesting. And the reason for that, again, is because when duplicating, it didn't preserve rotate E2 and move up E3.
So let's very quickly recalculate that. And all of a sudden it behaves itself. As a rule of thumb, if you start to see indicated toolpaths doing crazy things and links and leads doing mad things, always have a look to make sure that the relevant axes are enabled for direct motion control. So we're going to go back to simulation now.
And we've already got that one done. However, for the sake of being able to see everything that's going on properly, I am going to, yeah, I'm going to move in here. I'm going to simulate up to this current operation. And then I'm just going to let it go.
So what that did was it just showed us that vertical morph pass. However, we can see that that's a nice clean pass. We know that the preceding one works just fine, although we will play that now just to be certain. But we can see that the interactions between these two are functionally ideal.
Okay. We've got that perfect edge definition there going on as a result of the morph pass. So the thing that needs to happen next is we need to take a look at multiplying that out. And in the next video, what we're going to do at this point is we are going to have a look at group multiplication, which is a technique I've not covered in videos yet.
When it is something that you understand and are happy to work with, it is a huge time saver though. So I shall see you in the next video.