Carbide Motion knows what time the project started, and it is already telling me what percentage it is through the project. Seems like it would not be too difficult to include a running stop-watch to show me how long the project has been running AND an estimated finish time.
If you really wanted to get fancy, also include the estimated time of the next tool change.
I would also think timer could be a good idea near percentage progress…
Yes, please.
Started a cut at 8:00 p.m. last night, expecting it to just be an hour, two at the most. Didn’t get to bed until well after 1:00 a.m. or so, and had to kill off the job to do so.
Although the percentage is not time based, but based on number of lines. However, I don’t see why would be hard to compute time per movement as it knows the feed rate and current/target positions.
I highly recommend you download a copy of the free software called CAMotics (which used to be called openSCAM). It provides time estimates that I have found to be MUCH closer to the actual time than MeshCAM ever gets.
Frankly I’ve stopped bothering to check the MeshCAM estimations.
Here’s a link: http://camotics.org/
I downloaded Camotics but it doesn’t appear to open files from Carbide Create (.c2d files or .egc). Is there a way to estimate time for a job in either Carbide Create or Carbide Motion (or a way to convert the files into something that Camotis can open?)
Thanks!
Kind of… Every machine has a slightly different “Actual” time in reality, but there are many settings that go into play including the settings inside the machine as well like the acceleration rate on each axis etc. It’s really an estimate at best on any program’s part. It’s not simple task to build an estimate to be honest. Adding an ACTUAL time completed is a much easier task.
Open the file from Carbide Create in Carbide Motion:
The timer in HSM for Solidworks is pretty bang on if anyone is using it.
It would also be nice for Motion to have a realtime XZY position to be displayed in job…or am I missing something?
My software displays XYZ but it’s only every 2 seconds to conserve on processing. Real time would be not realtime anyways since to get the XYZ you have to interleave a “?” symbol to the com port while the G-Code is processing and it may be close to real time but there are serial buffers it must go through first anyways. So my thoughts since it has to process this status request so much, was to simply check every 2 seconds so it doesn’t interfere with the job being sent.
But as I said before, a “Completed” actual time would still be nice so you know how long the job actually took!
Thank you. MeshCAM is often off by over 100% and sometimes by thousands of percent. They should put a disclaimer on their timer saying the time will be the estimated time x 1 to 10x
IMO, if it were just +15/-0% that would be great.