Troubleshooting and Final Cleanup 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 there. So this final video is mainly about tying up the loose ends and resolving minor issues that are with this project so far. So the first thing that I'd like to focus on is cancelling out these red operation nodes. So we're going to focus on the Flatland 2 operation first and if we click on the operation and then hover the mouse over the node it tells us what the error is which is a contact with workpiece on rapid feed.
So this is an issue that can be solved in the links menu. So if we go there now and the two primary things here that I'm seeing that are causing me some concern. One is the link clearance height and this is the height that's set for the tooltip to elevate by when it's moving across areas that it's already machined. 0.
1 of a millimeter is rather small so I'm going to bump that up to 2 millimeters which is a little exaggerated but you know with the amount of interpolation that goes on with robot motion the more we give it the easier a time it has. And the other one is the safe distance which is a sort of an XY coordinate issue whereby it's only got 0. 6 millimeters to be able to play with there which is a bit on the small side. So I'm going to bump that up from 10% to 50% which should give us 3 millimeters and hopefully that should resolve the worst of those problems.
So we're going to recalculate this now and the unfortunate side effect of having to go back and do changes midway through is that it does affect every subsequent operation as well. So I'm going to very quickly recalculate everything just to make sure that everything is recalculated fully because sometimes it leaves gaps. and subsequent to that I'm going to take a look at the other two operations that were still coming up red after the simulation as well. So there's a few more red things coming up here but none of this has been simulated since so I'm fairly confident that most of those are invalid responses.
However the 2D contour 1 and 2D contour 2 operations were presenting us with problems. So if we take a look at 2D contour 1 the first thing that I can see that's likely to cause us an issue is the fact that we don't have any kind of proper lead-in. or lead-out nor do we have any kind of plunge resolution and if we hover the mouse over the red node we can probably see that yes contact with workpiece on rapid feed and the ramp angle is too high. So that means that we don't have any proper ramping enabled and the contact of the workpiece on the rapid feed means that it just plows straight into where it needs to be cutting without any kind of lead-in.
So let's change that now. We can set the lead-in so if we set the engage lead-in by arc now seven millimeters radius doesn't sound very big but if we pan over to a top-down view. and look we can see that this radius is going to exceed the bounds of these smaller holes. So I'm going to set that radius to three millimeters instead which is much much tighter but that should keep everything within its respective tolerance.
We're also going to set a plunge on lead-in so I'm going to set the height of that plunge to 100% which is four millimeters just to give it a little bit extra to work with. I'm also going to increase the ramp angle quite drastically on this because these are quite small holes that they've got to work into there's not a lot of space for a very very low angle to come in. so I'm going to set it to near vertical but not quite so 75 degrees and I'm also going to smooth the arc of that approach as well so it's a five millimeter radius on there. Now finally there was one other thing that I spotted which I'm hoping you should have caught as well.
In this large cutout area here the placement for this entry point is not great. It's going to cause us problems because it's going to try and arc out into the actual workpiece itself so we're going to grab this. and we're going to move it over to a straight area where it's got plenty of space to work with and now we're going to recalculate all of the toolpathing for this. so if we regenerate that toolpath now excellent we should see that everything feeds in properly so I'm going to copy these same settings over to the 2d contouring toolpath as well purely.
because I'm pretty confident that this should resolve the bulk of our problems. and it means that we've got a good starting point with no major differences between them if there is anything further that we need to address. so I shall very quickly do that now 100% 75 degrees 5 millimeters with an engage by arc of 3 millimeter radius. and we now click on generate okay that's all looking good yep.
so after all of that what I'm going to do now is I'm going to. regenerate all of the toolpaths for all of these operations. and then I'm going to run the simulation as well and to save your time what I'll do is I'll come back once the simulation has been run so you can see the end result you can see that all of the nodes are green okay so let's go back into a top view here. so we can see everything clearly and I'll catch you in a couple of minutes well so now that we've come back we can see that at the end of this simulation every single node that's in here is green.
so this is really good news for us so far there are a couple of things that we still need to resolve one is the sections that are internal that haven't been cut completely cleanly although these are very easy to fix. and also there is this section here that hasn't been cut particularly well now realistically something that's a side face like that would ordinarily be handled as a secondary operation with a weird spurs that are forming along the. edge of the wall here. so if we turn on verify compare they should come up a lot more cleanly you see these big blue jagged marks here okay so we can resolve that and as I say these two little blue sections here are something that we also want to deal with.
so to deal with those little blue sections this is quite simple we can just set up a new 3d finishing plane it doesn't have to be very very big. so if we just look at the exact area that we need which is just this little segment here. and if we go to job assignment we can now draw a polyline specifically describing the exact area that we'd like to clean up which I believe this should cover the majority of. so if we just highlight that for a second and yeah you can see that it should do a nice job of it and we also want to do this one as well.
so there we go that's where we need it to be so we'll define another polyline here and that should hopefully cover everything that we require so let's just check. and yes perfect okay so the important things to remember especially. when drawing a lot of polylines on here is to make sure to deselect the tool afterwards because otherwise you'll start drawing errant lines everywhere which is a bit of a pain. and we now need to define both of these curves as the job zone interesting I only had one curve selected there so let's find out what the second spline is.
so the first one oh no it maintained the selection of both that is strange okay so the next thing that we need to define is we want to and click on bottom level. because that's the lowest we wanted to cut to. so under strategy we can now look at what that height is we only need to take two or three millimeters down so realistically we can set this to 64. and that should be absolutely enough I'll also turn on scalloping for 0.
1 of a the angle at. which we're cutting as well just to give a cutter the best fighting chance of getting in there. so I am going to rotate this by about 90 degrees or so just to try and approximate the best the best usage of space there. so that should be absolutely fine we should now be able to generate the toolpath.
and hopefully toolpath is empty after run ah of course we didn't set the sixth axis control so that's a fixed vector and then regenerate. and there you go we now only have two small areas that are being machined although for some reason it's not bothering with the second one which is not ideal. so it may be that we need to change the angle of that slightly so if we scroll that around a little bit. so my main concern is that we don't want any of the movements or motions to be too short.
because if the shorter it makes them the less chance it has of completely covering the area so we regenerate that toolpath now okay it's still only doing that first one. so if we very quickly simulate this just to see what it comes up with slow it down a tiny bit and yeah. so it cleans up this area perfectly well doesn't bother cleaning this one up though so what we can do to force its hand is we can actually duplicate this toolpath and. then just move this region into the second toolpath so that might end up resolving our problem it also means that we can adjust our angle accordingly if we need to as well so we click on duplicate.
and in this one we delete the first geometry and in this one we delete the second geometry. and we recalculate both of these excellent okay that should be absolutely fine. and we can now simulate both of these from where we are so slow this down there you go. so that's the first one and now we have the second one being machined away which is perfect so that should give us a much much cleaner surface finish there.
and you can see how there's a tiny amount of pale blue but nothing serious there and bearing in mind the pale blue is only well 0. 01 of a millimeter difference so overall that's pretty good now finally I would like for us to try. and clean up this edge a bit now there's a couple of different ways we can try and approach it but I'm going to go with the simplest. and the least likely to go wrong and that is going to be using a 3d contouring path just to follow this curve up that's it nothing more okay because as soon as we start following it down we start running into compensation issues which can lead to gouges of the part.
so if we go to add operation 3d entry and 3d contouring we can now define this curve as the curve that we're after. and we want to make sure that there's the offset defined here as well so. when we pan over to the top we can see that that line is now offset from here by half the tool width that's great the next thing that we need to define so as to avoid any kind of gouging issues. so if we go into strategy and we set the bottom offset of this as well so I'm going to set this to 1.
5 millimeters which should give us just enough clearance to be able to make a very nice quick clean scoop of that okay. so we'll go back to setup and define the sixth axis control to fixed vector and press generate. and with a little bit of luck hang on we've got our first problem here what's this reporting contact with workpiece on rapid feed okay we know how to deal with this. so if we go back to the links menu and we set engage to by arc it should swoop in.
and out nicely on that we don't need to bother with dealing with the radius of that. or anything at this stage that should do as well I'm also going to actually no I'm gonna set that by line because I would like it to come off and on nice and cleanly okay. so we should be able to recalculate that now and hopefully we won't run into any problems there's none indicated there so if we simulate this now we'll run this nice and slow just to check. when we click on run you see the tool coming in here now okay so that now comes in.
and all it's doing is it's just scrubbing off of those spurs there nothing more okay. because this is already fairly close to final height and we're not going to achieve a perfect result with a ball nose finish because again that really is something that wants to be handled at a different approach. but for scrubbing off as much material as is possible to try minimize that load going forward I think that's probably about the best result we're going to achieve with this so wait for that tool to figure out where it's going now. and once that's finished we should get a green node there which is great and with the verify compare we can see the vast majority of this is now green.
and clean this is about as close as we're going to be able to get completely finishing a project on this kind of a shape so ordinarily this sort of form would be done probably with more five axis motions. but we have managed to stick entirely within 2d and 3d operations throughout all of this. which I'm hoping has highlighted the versatility of these operations to you as well as illustrating just how powerful some of the tools for being able to fault find and troubleshoot ENCY provides us with. so I hope this has been informative and helpful for you and I shall see you in the next video series take care.