I’m using Fusion 360 for CAM and Carbide Motion to drive the Shapeoko (haven’t jumped into UGS yet) and wondered what people’s preferences were for exporting their CAM from Fusion for the Shapeoko.
I don’t have the bitsetter (out of stock) so at the moment (I think) I need to run separate .nc files for each tool to let me use the regular bitzero X, Y, Z block to reset for Z height each time I change tool. (Have I got this wrong?)
If that’s correct, then… Given that it seems to make sense (especially for REST machining) to keep toolpaths that relate to each other, especially those with a common work zero, in one Setup, what workflows do people like using to export sets of toolpaths into files for Carbide Create to run?
I may well be missing something in Fusion, been using folders under the setup to group by tool so far and plan to buy a bitsetter if and when the health and supply chain issues reduce enough for them to come back into stock.
Honestly I don’t even bother organizing my F360 toolpaths inside a given Setup, I will just Ctrl-select the set of consecutive toolpaths that use the same tool, and run the post-processor on that, rince and repeat for other tools.
Same as @Julien for me. I’ve found that the naming convention I use for the output gcode is the more important part of the process for me, since I create all this stuff in one room and then run it in another (sometimes days later). So I’ll name my files something like this:
01-T22-LC-Pocket.nc
02-T11-LCZ0-Cutout.nc
which is (order) - (tool number) - (zero point: LC = “left corner, top of stock”, LCZ0 = "left corner, bottom of stock, etc) - (name of operation)
That might not make any sense to somebody else but it works for me. That plus a “stock.txt” file in the same directory (to note what stock size I used when I did the CAM) makes the whole thing relatively self-contained and repeatable over time.
One day, when I was deep into “Anything worth doing is worth over-doing” mode, I put together this little tool board. I assigned tool numbers to all of my stuff in Fusion (and the same number-tool combination in VCarve Pro, as I use both) and put them on the board as such. That way, there’s never any question as to which tool to use, and if I need to double-check what I’m supposed to be doing in Carbide Motion (which happens shamefully often) I can just look at the file name in the ‘run’ tab.
Of course, CM asks for the tool by number anyway, but I like to have everything in place before pushing the shiny ‘go’ button.
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