Happy answer day- Any idea if window select for holes is coming?

[Anonymous]

I do thousands of holes in grid patterns for pcb, and thought this was coming.

[josef.kucera]

Hi @Anonymous,

do you have any example design on which you would like to use window select on holes?

Regards,

Josef

[Anonymous]

I do, but I can not post until 230ish

[josef.kucera]

ok, no problem, I will wait...

[Anonymous]

Josef, I should have clarified window select for drilling. This is smaller board for me. I still have to use other software to design and machine this. My work flow looks like this cam 350 > to Autocad 2013  as .dxf (Handles the holes awesome) > Gibbscam as a. dxf(because it can handle the entities/ holes)/ Fusion 360 for the smaller boards(because it can currently can not handle the holes. 

I would like to window select which areas to drill(since i don't need every thing?

And is there any plans for fusion to be able to handle the holes or machine from the .dxf?

Thanks for allowing me to open the conversation about this.

[Steinwerks]

I haven't downloaded your file, but honestly the easiest thing to do would be extrued the DXF into a 3D model and then use the CAM to select all the holes of the same diameter. I doubt that selecting holes of the same diameter from a sketch is anywhere near being added as an option.

[Anonymous]

The problem with selecting holes of the same size is it often leaves you with a thousand more holes than you need, and it makes it harder to pick up the pattern when a drill breaks.I often do 10000 wholes .062 diameter through .62 G10 fiber glass epoxy. I  like to group the holes in blocks because it makes it easier to track drill breaks. You may have to open the file to understand.

[Steinwerks]

I think I do but I'll open the file on my lunch break and take a look. I may have a workaround because I don't expect your desired workflow is coming any time soon.

[Anonymous]

My work around was been to heavily edit in autocad, but I cant wait for the days I only need to softwares.

[Steinwerks]

This solution may seem a bit silly, but I think it will work for you for the time being:

1) Split your model into sections.

2) Create a Setup for each section, but make sure you have a uniform point to set the WCS to (in the attached example I used Stock Point that corresponds with both halves).

3) Post all Setups into one NC file, which should provide clear delineations between drilling sections.

4) Profit.

(that's a lot of holes)

[porsbym]

I think the suggestion by @Steinwerks is probably the easiest workaround for your problem right now.

One other workaround that springs to mind is to adjust the diameter of the holes in groups so that you have groups of holes with diameter 0.06201, 0.06202, 0.06203 etc. Select Same Diameter by default compares the diameter to 1/100000th of the tool diameter. You can, by the way, adjust this if you edit the operation with Compare and Edit.

Both options are of course workarounds, and we do have two enhancements on our backlog that I think would solve help a lot:

Ordering of holes by pattern (linear, zig-zag, circular etc.).

"Machining Boundary" support for Drill. This is essentially like a window selection, but driven by a face or sketch which gives you a way to associatively limit the area where you want to "select same diameter" holes.

Both enhancements are unfortunately not at the top of our list at the moment, but your request of course makes us re-think the current priority of these.

/Mark