People will love your Mastercam Post comments

Time to have some code hitting the screen, check out the 3 intros if you missed them; Mastercam Post Processor Intro, Pick your Editor and Post for Mastercam and Post Debugging in MastercamX4. If you want to make friends, make other peoples life easier. That is exactly what we are going to do today, even with out doing something really scary to our post and our code. Our post is going to translate some miscellaneous codes into our native tongue.

Make code easy reading… There is no doubt that understanding code makes trouble shooting so much easier, and knowing what M09 does makes a better operator. Still you get the operator who’s vocabulary only contains the phrase “The machine did something weird, and I swear I did not do anything”. Adding comments in your post output might not make your operator litteraly learn code, but it might make the comnunication between programmer and operator easier, and even let less skilled operators run 1st piece on simpler parts.

Find coolant call in post… With the debug activated from previus post Post Debugging in MastercamX4 Press “Run” under Debug and let the post work itself to the M30. Now left click on the coolant on call “M08” and notice the Post screen jump to “ptlchg_com”.

ptlchg_com… So we know that our coolant is being activated in this string, we will open our mpmaster post in our editor and search for ptlchg_com. Notice the line number 1777 this is the actual string, the other ptlchg_com are the post directing to this line. The way you can tell what is the actually string is it is all the way to the left and followed by a # and a comment.

*scoolantx… Reading through ptlchg_com we end up with our M08 being a forced (the * tells us that) output in line (1) 3302. Anything between ” will be posted as is in the output, and anything in ( ) in NC gode will not be activated by the control, so having the post output (2) (COOLANT ON) is only a note, not a function!. Notice (3) that I put #LARS in the end of my post line, this is simply a note to myself for future reference that I messed with this line. And of course remember to (4) save for this to take effect.

Note that coolant is off… Left click on M09 and the Post window tells us that “pretract” is the string where this code is activated.

pretract… Back to our editor and search for the string pretract, and as you start to scroll through the code, you will get 20 lines or so down…

Take care of M09 and M05… “COOLANT OFF” and “SPINDLE OFF” in the same screen shot how convenient 🙂 . If you are using the downloaded mpmaster post from InHouse Solution it should be easy to fill in the blanks. Don’t forget to save before exiting out of the editor.

I hope this is helpful to you and others on the shop floor, and you could feks. also add other comments such as G43 (LENGTH OFFSET) or M03 (SPINDLE ON). The most important thing is that you are very careful with what you change, because these machines will only do what you tell them, also remember to backup your post before any changes. You might notice that I made all comments in CAPS, it is different from the machines how they like there letters. Haas don’t care but Fanuc will show gibberish. Next blog post will be about your post processor asking you questions and insert your answer in the post….24 hours or so and it will be here.

#CADCAM #Mastercam #Postprocessor