Pick a colour...

Thursday, 31 May 2012

This isn’t a tip that a great many people are going to appreciate but I wish this had been possible years ago, maybe it was, If so I wish someone had told me!

When working in Delcam’s Powermill with named levels and surfaces it is extremely easy to automate repetitive processes through writing macros. Easy enough if the modelling software you have used is Delcam’s own Powershape but what if you are using Solidworks?.

Selecting wireframe and surfaces then individually naming them every time eats away at any time you may have saved from setting your configurations up in Solidworks.

One great little tip is to utilize the smart selection tool in Powermill, this is found in the default thickness form. 

Ensure your surfaces are coloured accordingly in Solidworks before exporting your .iges model into Powermill and you now have the ability to run a macro that will pick these surfaces for the creation of boundaries, patterns etc.

I know have a ‘one click’ macro that I can use reducing my programming time for the last job I worked on from 10mins to under 1min. Not a huge saving but it’s implementing little time savers like this and stream lining standard processes that can really make a difference to any engineering department.