Feature Request, Installed tool Flags.

[elespecial]

Good evening, i have been thinking about this after a sour experience...

Hopefully this is the right place to ask this...

My CNC mill has the capacity for 10 tools at the carrousel, and the controller can do different tool Lengths (edges), so i have way more than 10 tools created in Fusion, 4 machines in my workshop and they don't share tools between them..

Given the fact that in each tool library i have more than 10 tools (Cnc mill for example) i would like to be able to FLag the installed tools on the machine,,, Imagine that the installed tools then show a yellow background on the tool lists...

it will first prevent me from choosing the wrong tool from the list when programming CAM, second, it will show an evident error on the Post window when you confirm the operation on the second tab, it will display the list of tools and i could spot quickly that i have added a tool that is not on the machine.

[engineeringQCQFN]

Hello

If machines don't share tools, wouldn't be easier to create 4 tool libraries, one for each machine?

[DarthBane55]

But that still wouldn't tell him which tools are currently installed in the machine.
I think we have a couple of machine where we manage this exact situation with an excel spreadsheet.

[guilherme.awv]

If loaded tools are always changing, he would have to tell fusion all the time, it seems just time consuming working like this. There are better ways to manage this out of fusion.

[DarthBane55]

Not necessarily, it depends how your shop is setup.

But for example, if you have a machine with 10 tools in the mag, but you build a library of 500 tools in Fusion for that machine, you can program with T400 and tell your machine that T400 is in pot #5.

Then it makes sense to keep track of what tool is in what pot in the machine.

I cannot be 100% certain this is what OP is after, but I thing it might be...

We work that way on a different scale.  Our machines mostly hold 240 tools, and our tool mags are mostly near 1000 tools, and we use the tools are per the tool numbers in Fusion.  So say we use tool #750, we tell the machine that T750 is in pot 220, etc.  It is critical to keep track of that.  On that scale tho it is much simpler to manage with a well built spreadsheet than within Fusion, but I could imagine that on a smaller scale, one might want to do it directly inside Fusion.

[elespecial]

I would like to have the chance to tell fusion what tools I have loaded every time I change the setup un my carrousel... I know for some people this may look silly, but it would help me a lot.

[elespecial · Accepted solution]

I only would like a simple tick box on every tool, so i can flag it if i confirmed it is installed on the machine.

[elespecial]

i have 4 different libraries, inside a library i have more tools than the carrousel capacity, so i find useful to flag them as Installed on the machine..  imagine that the flagged tools show up on every list as a highlighted text.... that way i can easily spot if i am selecting a tool not available at the carrousel... 

[ltomuta]

It would be a bit of a mess for Fusion to know in detail what your machine contains. And prety much impossible inless you do the job setup in Fusion (machinists checking the tool added and its lenght not against a setup sheet but directly in a tool library ...) But then what happens when a machinists takes a tool from machine X because it needs it on machine Z?

But if you know what program was last executed on machine X then you can open that document and create your next CAM program picking tools from that document as the main source. When something more is needed, you take it from the other libraries...

[bbrownellLS4J4]

I would like to see this feature added as well.  For our situation we have a small 10 tool changer on our mill and a variety of tooling needs, i would say roughly 4 of the tools are changing often.  It would be nice to know what exactly is loaded into the machine when working remotely.  We have been managing this by manually changing tool numbers in the library so people can know exactly what is active in the machine.