— ONGAA CAM

Working with many parts with many manufacturing steps poses a challenge in keeping things organized.   To have even a fighting chance parts need to be identified – labeled – to ensure that everyone know what the part is.

Even with the sophisticated – ‘123-4567’ / project-part numbering scheme we very often need more information and to ensure that the next person knows what to do.

ONGAA CAM has expanded its label printing capabilities in Nesting to support not only the following information:

• Project with Sheet number
• seq# and Part Number/Name
• Dimensions
• Material Name

An now also include up to 8 Solidworks custom properties and a dedicated ‘Barcode’ source property.  An image of the part itself can also be placed on the label.

Supported encodings are 1-D  (3of9 barcode), 2-D QR Code and 2-D Data Matrix.

In the above example, the first custom property indicates the edge banding color and sides … Read the rest

With many facilities using multiple software packages to program/optimize/nest it gets hard to keep track of what parts were actually programed and which were not.

Many shops use Cut Rite for the simple rectangles and WoodWOP for the more complex components.  We see this as the best of both worlds — except that its gets messy keeping the parts straight.  Cut Rite ‘wants’ a file with dimensions or a MRP to load dimensions and WoodWOP definitely wants a program.

ONGAA CAM can now take the tedium out of programming the ‘regular’ rectangles automatically, whether or not you have made allowance for edge banding in the Solidworks parts or not.

With both ‘Edgeband Size Vars’ and ‘Add Nesting Contour’ turned on, ONGAA CAM will automatically create a ‘bounding-box’ contour and associated a Vertical Route process with it.  All process options are configurable including Tool, direction, compensation, approach and even ‘midline start’.… Read the rest

In order to promote the effectiveness of ONGAA CAM when working with bSolid instead of BiesseWorks, ONGAA CAM now produces CIX programs in addition to BPP.

Although bSolid will import straight forward BPP files without any need to manipulate the file in any way, we have had several reports of bSolid importing some process options incorrectly which would either ‘break’ a process or negate its usefulness.  In particular, Vertical milling in steps was rendered ineffective as Z and Depth were swapped when imported.  Horizontal steps was also ‘broken’ due to the step increment being imported as a negative.

To support our customers who are now using bSolid, we have endeavoured to both debug the BPP  import issues as well as provide a better working solution.… Read the rest

Do I model with edgebanding included in the parts or do I model the raw parts and add edgebanding are parts to my assembly?  Do I have to make two models?

Modelling parts which may or may not be edge banded (depending on materials) pose a challenge when it comes to other software which may be part of a production flow.  This is particularly challenging when both sets of programs / files  are always sent to the shop and the flow is chosen on the floor.

Take for example a shelf which may be made or oak or  a plywood of some kind.  In the case of the plywood the 2 visible edges would need edgebanding, in the case of oak however it would not be.

Ideally the model of the part would be the same and therefore so would the program IF all possible production streams are equal.  But … Read the rest

Process by Process

By far the fastest way to verify the programs do not have ‘basic’ programming errors would be to ‘see’ what has been programmed.  ONGAA CAM now shows a reasonable representation of the tool in is starting position.  The tool dimensions are taken from the Tool Database and are shown with the programmed compensation, depth (or through depth).  This will help in ensuring tool compensations are correct as well as showing potentially unexpected interference with other areas of the part.

Tools that are incorrectly identified appear as red tools of a standard diameter where as all recognized tools appear as green.

V Drill, V Route, V Pocket, V Saw, H Drill are all supported.

Full simulation

Once all the processes have been defined, a simulation of all machining is available.

 … Read the rest

The ONGAA CAM nesting interface has been improved to provide easier manual movement of parts as well as allowing renestiong of single sheets (in a multi sheet nests).

USER INTERFACE

The initial view of the nest remains the same with the first 4 sheets displayed.  By double clicking on any sheet a full screen view of the sheet is displayed.  Both the initial 4 sheet and the single sheet now includes the sheet scrap material and also left and right mouse button drag & drop movement.  If the sheet boundary is exceeded both the part and the sheet scrap boundary are highlighted to indicate this.

RENESTING

An option has been added to allow renesting of a single sheet for those times when then nesting strategy works for most sheets but not all.

The renest option also allows you to resize the ‘working area’ of a sheet and/or change the strategy … Read the rest