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Face Milling and Roughing Waterline is part of 2D and 3D Milling with ENCY Robot. Sign in with your ENCY account to access lessons, assignments and progress tracking.

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Hi, so in this video we're going to be importing and setting up the roughing operations on this workpiece. So we're going to the model space and we're going to import the file. We'll just go through the standard checks to make sure it's all placed properly. So locate zero, middle, middle, min, apply, move it up 50mm in Z, no 50 not 500, apply and close.

and now we're going to the machining environment and we can see it's automatically placed itself on the small table in this environment. I'm going to switch around to this view here just because it's generally easiest to work out what's going on from here. This model file and this robot cell will be available for independent download in the comments section of this video. So beyond this point we need to define the workpiece.

So I'm going to set this to be a primitive box around the parts with 5mm of excess in each plane except for a negative Z because we've got no way of machining under this. because the whole purpose of this series of videos is to utilize the basic 3D functionality. So the robot will be operating in much the same manner as a traditional 3D mill will in this instance, so add and close. Now one of the things that we can do to define the orientation and management of the robots to try and limit any future problems instead of defining the tool orientation for each.

and every operation. If we set the 6th axis control to a fixed vector this means that the orientation of the 6th axis will stay locked in that Z orientation. so we won't have to deal with defining tool orientation or axial approach for each and every operation hopefully. We'll also set the links to avoid collisions because.

although there's not a lot of very complicated high sided topology in this model it is generally the best approach philosophy for this particular style of machining as. well. So now that that's done we can define our first operation. and I'd like to change the way that we work in this slightly since we're emulating a 3D milling process we're going to be using a lot of setups in this not to the fullest extent in the.

case of a standard milling application you can use setups to define different layouts of the workpiece. and everything. For this it's purely just to make sorting through our operations a bit simpler and a bit easier to remember so I'm going to go to structure and add a setup stage which we are going to rename and you can do this by right clicking. and selecting rename or just pressing ctrl R and we're going to call this the roughing yep just call that roughing for now.

and the first operation we're going to add is going to be a 3D entry face milling operation now we can see that it's automatically lost the sixth axis control orientation. which is not ideal but it's an easy fix as opposed to having to go through the full traditional system now if we set in parameters we want the tolerance to be a little bit looser than that just for the sake of a. faster calculation so we're going to press 0. 02 going to turn off check for plunges because I found with this job in particular we get a lot of iterative complaints about plunges that don't actually affect the final outcome in the slightest.

so I'm just going to default to turning that off for the moment and under strategy we can see these levels that we've got here. so 92. 129 corresponds to the very very top of the material 87. 129 corresponds to the top of the actual object.

so I'm going to increase that slightly to give us a little bit of extra material to work with in later later operations so I'm typing 88 millimeters here and we're going to try generating a toolpath. and as we can see there are some parts that it can't reach in its current orientation because it doesn't quite know how to and we've got some very strange links and leads coming in here. so if we now go into the axis map we should be able to see the culprit for this problem. and as I suspected we have a lot of out of limits issues specifically centering around the zero degrees deflection point here this is due to the fact that in I.

suppose what you could call a zero position for a robot because it's so close to a series of fixed parameters it can hit a singularity very quickly and it can effectively lock itself up. so we need to deflect it from this very slightly just to be able to give it the best chance calculating it's it's one of those situations. where the kind of thing that a much simpler machine can do with great ease a robot struggles with obviously these particular instances are relatively few and far between but you do need to be aware of them. so if we click on build map now and then build graph and then we update the toolpath accordingly we can see how there's been that alteration in angle for the the sixth axis orientation.

but we've now got a completely clear toolpath there so that means that we've now got a perfect spiral toolpath that will clear up the first or the first parcel material for it which is great. so the next thing that we're going to do now sorry just adjust the zoom slightly is we're also going to set up a roughing waterline path so we go to the add operation menu. and on the 3d entry we go for roughing waterline now this 80 millimeter tool is going to be too large to really get into a lot of this so I'm going to adjust the parameters of that slightly obviously. when you're setting up a job like this yourself for the real world you'll have a list of tools available to you that will be in your tool table because this is purely hypothetical I'm going to invent a couple of standard tools that we'll use throughout this.

so we're going to go with the 20 millimeter diameter and say a 60 millimeter length so it's still quite a chunky tool should be good and solid we'll press apply changes and create a new tool so that's great. and we need to define that sixth axis control okay looks like I got that wrong at the very beginning and we also need to define where we want this to actually go on. so I'm going to tell it that I want it to be able to do all of the waterline roughing inside this region and the easiest way to do this is to be able to grab one of these edge lines and then just tell it to chain all around. so I'm going to turn on select edges I'm going to double click on that and you can see how it's automatically grabbed the entire chain nine times out of ten this will behave exactly as you hope it will do however sometimes.

when you're dealing with more complicated topologies the chain won't necessarily follow the order that you initially expect so as with every other kind of 3d selection tool you can still use shift and control to select. and deselect individual parts as well so I'm going to set that as the job zone I'm now going to define this as the top level. and this as the bottom level and from here I am going to generate the toolpath and we should see the same issue again where it can't reach everything. so we'll there we go now fortunately due to the relative simplicity of the part we're working on axis mapping is not an incredibly long and painful process although.

when the tool pathing starts to get more detailed and intricate this will slow down significantly so I will be pausing for the duration of those just to save you from spending 10 minutes watching not much. so again we have all of these difficulties around the zero point on the sixth axis so we need to which is fine so build the graph update toolpath. and now we have this lovely clear roughing area and I suspect that this complaint here is it's about a plunge move. so again we're not really super worried about these at the moment the plunging approach is generally fine the tool will be spinning fast enough to be able to accommodate a simple plunge.

so I'm going to turn off check for plunges for the moment just to keep these clear I'm aware of it in the back of my mind and obviously when prototyping a toolpath like this the first thing you do is you do check with a very very slow dry run but yeah. so for now we're just going to simulate what we've got. and since we're using solid body simulation on this we should get a much more accurate read of what the final cutting is going to look like as opposed to using say the voxel simulation which is much better for things like sculptural elements. but when it comes to hard material machining like this solid body is significantly more accurate and something that I have just noticed.

which I hadn't set in this is I haven't given myself any kind of stock allowances here so again I'm going to set this to 0. 2 for speed I'm going to add a millimeter radial and a millimeter axial stock just. so the finishing passes actually have something to do and that should regenerate with the same parameters I had before. so we should be good there we'll just double check the axis map just to be certainly sure as we can see it's extended a little bit there we've not got any surprises so break that calculation build the map update.

and now we can simulate just to make sure that our part is good so I'm going to zoom back out and then come in a little bit closer and we'll speed up the simulation. and we are going to be stopping and simulating multiple times throughout the setup of this because realistically it is the kind of job that a lot of checking throughout so we'll run this now. and that's our initial facing path that's good and we've now got our waterline roughing. which is nice seems to be going well with no complaints so far.

which is exactly what we're after we now have nice green load statuses throughout obviously the fact that we turned off plunge detection will affect that but you know that's that's a relatively minor thing. and something that since we're aware of it it becomes less of a problem I'll see you in the next video where we start setting up our first cleanup processes and then we're going to start moving into finishing. and surfacing at a later point see you then.