I was investigating lathe adaptive roughing again last night and I see that the documentation suggests this is a preview feature (which in itself suggests that it is in active development).
I'm still struggling to get this to work in anything other than a very limited fashion. Rather like a party game, it seems to require experimentation to figure out the myriad rules and checks that have been implemented under the hood. For instance, there seem to be cross checks on the settings such as the insert diameter, min radius, optimal load etc. Some of these are fairly obvious hard requirements but there seem to be others that are preventing many of the features from working at all, judging by the cryptic error messages that come up. Given the lack of information / documentation, we are having to go into this blind.
A couple of things I've found so far:
- Adaptive roughing only works with "turning grooving" tools. I could understand why certain operations can only be done with omnidirectional tools but clearly you could use an adaptive path with handed tools, with appropriate limits on toolpath directions. Either way, I don't think "Select a turning tool from the library, or create a new turning tool" in the documentation quite covers it.
- The (grooving) tool has to have a "round shape", as set in the tool library. No matter what I do, I can't get the "square shape" to be accepted without an error. Yet it's listed as an option in the "turning grooving" tool library.
- If I enter ANY value in the "finishing allowance" (aka stock to leave in milling terminology), I get an error "Warning: Could not reach all contour areas with given tool and optimal engagement!". For a roughing operation, this is a bit of a major issue!
I hope you can give this the resource required to thoroughly develop and test out the features. Ideally you will also include an update to the documentation, such as it is, laying out the limitations and checks that we need to take into account. Is there a roadmap for this activity that gives us some visibility of what to expect?
On a related note, the LinuxCNC lathe post processor on the Autodesk site is still generating G28 U & W move commands which aren't recognised by LinuxCNC - they need to be G28 X & Z but despite several requests, there seems to be little interest in correcting this.
