Saturday, August 16, 2014

Sharing Our Setup Sheet

We are a small engineering office in a metalworking company, with very limited budget. 

Some day around july 2013 our organization bought 2 licences of bobcam V3 for solidworks. The demo presentation was awesome and we were looking for a inexpensive CAM solution. In demo, the salesperson told us that it could generate setup sheets for operators use. We discovered later that it can´t do that... ragefully we called the representative with our complaint, and the response was that it was not told in the presentation because it has not the function. His word against ours. The money was already paid by the person in charge of that, so there was little to do in that direction.

The setup sheet is essential for us because we can tell the operators what tools, where and how it will move in a program. Also, its easier for us to pass the work sheets with all the tool data than trying to explain and wasting time doing it.

We started to look how to solve the problem, and with no additional budget for that, we built a macro-enabled excel spreadsheet. 

We want to share our hard work so no one has to suffer like we did. If you appreciate what we did, you can drop us a donation. With your support we can expand our budget a little and buy an aircon for the office. We will be very grateful.



You can see above how the output is, very straightforward. The comment before the operation is listed as operation comments. The tool comments are based in a table in the spreadsheet, so you can customize the tool comments as you like. In the gcode, the comment before the operation is listed as operation comments. If there is a comment after an asterisk (*) the sheet will output the comment as tool comment, if not, it will output the tool comment in the table. If there isn´t any comment nor the tool is listed it will output "tool not specified", in case you post tool numbers without comments. Also, it lists as operation the intervals of code between two comments, numbering the operations and listing for every one its tool number, even if it repeats. And (there is more) it lists the max and min positions for every operations, the spindle speed, and feed rate.

Being a excel spreadsheet is easily customizable, logos and other stuff can be added.

We will continue to work improving this sheet and to post updates to it. If you have any doubts, suggestions, or thoughts, be sure to drop a comment below.

*Sorry about the paypal "pay now", because we are not a non-profit we cannot use the "donate" button.*

*DISCLAIMER* We are in no way affiliated with  BobCAD-CAM Inc., Dassault Systèmes, SolidWorks Corp., nor any other company here cited.


Below is the file licence:

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Have fun!