Use of the ‘Multiply Group’ operation 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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Hi there. So in this final video we're going to take our two 4D surfacing operations and we're going to set them into a group multiplication process which will then copy that so it covers the entirety of this twisted column. So to do so we're going to go back into the machining environment and we are going to add an operation and under the structure operation set we have multiply group as an option. Okay so I'm going to click on that and we are going to copy 4D surfacing 2 and 4D surfacing 1 and yes I know those are named backwards it's it's a relatively minor thing and for the sake of experimentation trying to find out what's doing we are going to first do this just twice.
So I'm going to set that as the E2 axis because that's the rotary axis we want. The multiply operation in this instance means the degrees of rotation that you want to multiply this by. So I'm going to set that to 30 because having drawn this and having counted it previously there are 12 iterations all the way around so that means that it's at 30 degree intervals. So we click 30 there and we're going to calculate this now.
So give that a second to think about it and we can see now that there are some slightly strange transitions there but nothing too concerning. So we're going to simulate this and see how it comes up looking. Okay so first things first we're going to reset that then we are going to simulate that current operation which should take out the roughing path just fine. Okay and we're going to run this now.
So speed this up a tiny bit. So we can see how it's going through the first of the 4D surfacing processes that deep curve that we'd already defined initially and in a second it's going to carry on with the morph between two lines operation. There we go so we've got that nice clean operation there. We do have a small nick there.
Okay this is not the end of the world but it is something that I'd like to eliminate and again I think it's a feature of the fact that the roughing operation wasn't done properly beforehand so it's not a big deal but we can clean this up and check it. However we can see that that deep curve has now been copied across and we've got two iterations of this just fine and we've got that morph operation again just cleaning up and everything's come through. So we've got a couple of gouge complaints there but nothing serious. So what we can do here is we can take a quick look at the multiply group settings.
So we've got link and lead control within the multiply group itself and we've got avoid collisions already defined. However that will be predicated on everything having been cut in the roughing path as well. So what we can do is we can go back and we can double check that just at full speed make sure that everything's happy and we come up with green nodes. So we'll do so now we'll clean down all of these node statuses just to just to give ourselves a fighting chance of seeing what goes on.
We'll reset everything and we'll run it through fast so we're not going to watch it all in immaculate detail but we'll see what happens. So we've got our initial roughing going on here and we should then see our first two sets of groups there. At this point when it's dealing with this type of a compound path at full speed the simulation can look a little bit strange. You will get this stuttering and stopping between it because it's doing the full solid simulation of this but it's as I say because we're trying to make it go fast it can't express everything within the time span that it's got.
So don't be alarmed by that basically it doesn't mean there's stuff going wrong. So there we go we have got both of our iterations of the surfacing operation sorted. That's perfect. So we're now going to go back into the machining environment and under the multiply group settings we're going to go into the transformations tab and we're going to tell it to do this 12 times.
Now be aware this will take a short while to calculate so please don't be don't be alarmed if there's a bit of a wait when you try this yourself. Okay so I'm going to set that to 12 now. I'm going to kick off the calculation and for the amount of time it takes I will pause the video and then come back when it's done. Okay so I'll see you in a minute.
And one New York second later we have got a fully calculated 12 iteration copy of these toolpaths to give us an absolutely flawless one of these columns with all of the toolpathing done in the correct orientation to make it look as good as possible. Obviously we don't necessarily need to do something this complicated for every job but for things like this where sometimes the actual tool marking orientation can be important I think it gives it that little something extra that looks really decent. Plus the multiply group operation is an absolute godsend when it comes to dealing with multiples of anything. It's a huge time saver and a massive massive efficiency boost for programming.
So it's completely cap off this video we're going to go with a simulation run on this. Okay so in doing so I'm going to reset this simulation in its entirety. Let's just quickly fold these up because we don't really need to see every single 4D surfacing to 4D surfacing one. Okay I'm going to reset this we're going to leave it running a full chat and I'm not going to force you to watch the whole thing but I will come back once it's done.
Okay so we'll let the first couple of groups operate through. There we go that's operating as before it's giving us a nice clean deep curve there. And between lines there. So I'm going to let this crunch through the next few sets and I'll unpause the video when it's closer to completion.
Okay so as we can now see we are right at the very tail end of this program three and a half minutes into the the simulation which is very satisfying if it's one that you've just programmed. Not so fascinating to watch the whole thing as an instructional video. But we can see now that we have got a cleanly executed and in this case one with very clear tooling marks series of cuts to give us a nice and very very visible result there which should meet the needs of whatever your construction is perfectly. So we've demonstrated different methods of cutting using 4D surfacing we've demonstrated how the multiplication group works and hopefully this should give you access to a series of tools that especially when dealing with rotary objects like this that have got multiple repeated features should save you so much time and energy and effort.
I hope this video has been informative for you and I'll be sure to see you in the next series.