More 4/5 axis software info please

Great to see you have the 4/5 axis manual indexer out, now how about some more information?

Have you gotten it to work with DeskProto? If so can we get that info?

Can someone expound on handing off from Fusion 360? I've been using F360 for several weeks but from the one or two lines you have in the documentation I am lost as to how you would select a view and hand it off to Aspire.

Can any of this be handled in Vcarve 8 with its expanded capabilities? If no to both DeskProto and Vcarve, how much will the Upgrade to Aspire for Shopbot run us?


Thanx!

Hi Mark, you’re absolutely right, Vcarve v.8 has the newly-incorporated import 3d model tool which slipped by me so I will get on updating the documentation to reflect that today. I am not familiar with DeskProto myself, but I believe most of the functionality you would want for projects using the accessory could be found between Vectric software and Fusion.

At the moment there are two approaches to using Fusion 360 with the accessory. The first, as you mentioned would be to bring the model you would like to machine to a specific, non-90 degree orientation, which is beyond the capabilities of the import 3d model tool in Aspire and Vcarve (Teacup 1 attachment).

So if we open Fusion and upload the .stl of our model (I’ll use the teacup example again)

Right click your model and select Save as STL, and download and export the .stl to Meshmixer (Teacup 2)

In Meshmixer it is possible to rotate your model by selecting edit, and just typing in your desired rotation angles (there are some other useful tools worth exploring here too)

And finally you can just export from Meshmixer and re-import into your Vectric software (and as a future note Meshmixer will eventually be incorporated into Fusion itself)

The second way to use Fusion would be to use the CAM workspace to fully toolpath your part with a model of your stock and the accessory itself for reference. This would be useful as it would allow you to dynamically rotate the stock on the accessory itself using joints for example and would simplify the zeroing process. I haven’t actually gone this route yet for the Manual +2, just because I am more familiar with toolpathing in Aspire, but I've added a .step model of the accessory that could be imported into Fusion to the blog post if you'd be interested in downloading it and experimenting more. I will likely play around with it as well in the future.

Hope that helps and let me know if you've got any other questions!

David

David,
thanx so much for the follow-up.
I am starting to wrap my head around the workflow, and as I do, I can not help but think that using DeskProto would cut out a lot of unneeded steps. It works great right out of the box in continuous rotation mode, but I have yet to get it to work with other schemes. Something about all of their shopbot drivers thinks the rotational axis is running parallel to X when on the Handibot it runs parallel to Y. I am pretty sure once you or I crack the configuration it would work great in the turn, cut, turn mode.

David Bryan has some familiarity with DeskProto as he wrote the blog on using it with the rotary indexer. I am guessing he sits not far from you?

I would have never thought of using Meshmixer to do fixed rotations; that is brilliant and I have a lot to learn about a lot of software on my PC.

Hey Mark, glad to hear. David B is now working over at the School of Science and Math so I don't see him very much unfortunately! Personally I liked the idea of encouraging people to use Vectric and Fusion software because they come native with the tool and most people would be familiar with them, in an attempt to keep the accessory beginner/budget friendly, but I will look into DeskProto more today.

Also a useful trick for resolving that rotational axis issue might be to try a VI ([V]alues nputs/driver definitions) command in SB3 and try swapping your X and Y Driver Channels. Let me know if this works!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/17/2015 08:35AM by davepreiss_shopbot.