[MERGED] Approximate/rough guess of milling time

[dubstar-04]

This is now merged.

Yess!!! "happy dance"

and it only took 2 years!

[dubstar-04]

I will be able to look at it for individual 3D paths. But not for multiple OPs (I don't operate a conventional milling machine, thus I'm outside the typical workflow).
Regarding the behavior on no active OP, i can propose that it either be informative and display something like "No Active OP" or spartan and display "0:00:00", I like the spartan way as it is exactly what a DRO or a machine tool would display. The user would then figure out that something "is wrong" if he has active ops and a display time of 0.

This is fixed now. 00:00:00 is the default where the cycle time is 0 or there are no operations.

Thanks,

Dan

[RatonLaveur]

No, thank you! All i can do is bitch, moan and in that noise you may sometimes extract a half usable idea

[dubstar-04]

No, thank you! All i can do is bitch, moan and in that noise you may sometimes extract a half usable idea

Well, I certainly appreciate having you around to make suggestions, test, support other users and moan.

[Pauvres_honteux]

For us mere mortal design engineers I would like to ask if it would be possible to add some sort of support for surface roughness?

I guess this means more or less "step over" and ditto for feed rate, which in turn would mean less or more milling time?
Problem is, as a mere mortal design engineer, I do not have that knowledge. That knowledge is hidden deep in the damp and haunted burrows of the dark lords guild of Toolmakers!

Preferably it would work in such a way I "only" need to set a specific surface roughness per face, if possible?

[chrisb]

Preferably it would work in such a way I "only" need to set a specific surface roughness per face, if possible?

I think you should create a new operation if you want special tratment of a single face. But I can well think of "final horizontal feed" in the same way as we have the final step down.It's only sensible if pockets are milled from inside out.

[RatonLaveur]

I have mixed feelings about your proposition Pauvres_Honteux.

As a design engineer you only call out the roughness in your tech drawings. The machinist will take care of the rest (all suppliers and jobshops have different type of tooling/machine...and there is no one toolpath fits all). You shouldn't provide the toolpath too! It's quite literally their job for the reasons invoked above.

FreeCAD is a great project and can/should sometimes be different than other softwares. But getting a roughness from a toolpath or even more dubious, a toolpath from a a roughness may be pushing the Statement Of Goal as well as siphon the valuable efforts of kind contributors.

Either way this kind of " target" oriented thinking is great and definitely a very acive topic in the manufacturing industry today and for the foreseeable future. So ideas like this should be fostered and i wouldn't want to seem like I'm putting it down too hard. It's just that there are so many factors to roughness (machine type, material grade, tool type, tool material, tool coating, tool wear state, feeds and speeds, cutting fluid type and method of application, CNC specific commands such as spline interpolations, load controlled feed...etc)...
There's a reason you can't call a roughness in a CAM system today and obtain the inverse machining solution. It's literally a machine learning problem that will require baffling amounts of experimental data.

[GeneFC]

The "Approximate/rough guess of milling time" is a measurement tool.

The new request by Pauvres_honteux is for an optimization tool. It may require the measurement tool, but it is a vastly more complex operation than mere measurement.

Using the new measurement tool to check proposed path modifications should be straightforward. Manually making changes to the path and checking results is also very straightforward. However, deciding what to change to improve the milling time will depend on many functions completely outside of FreeCAD. It seems pretty far-fetched to include in FreeCAD the necessary factory constraints, business constraints, operator constraints, tool constraints, cost constraints, customer constraints, . . . .

The equivalent is saying, "I have a nice new ruler. Now go build a house."

Gene

[Pauvres_honteux]

I'm thinking that a rough estimate of the milling time taking the surface roughness into account should be possible to boil down to spindle speed, feed rate, step over and milling depth. Wouldn't it be sufficient for a rough calculation?
Are there not any rule of thumb you guys use in your daily profession?

[herbk]

A few thoughts about this tool, now that it's merged :

It seams to me like the calkulation of the milling time will be done each time if i change some parameter of a path, because there comes a warning at the output panel each time (wich is extremly boring atm, because FC opens the output panel for every little hint).

In my mind this is wasting of computing power... Why not calculate the milling time only after a button click?