Autodesk Proposed Automated Drilling

[aaron.williford]

First, I should introduce myself. I am a product manager here at Autodesk, I have been working on FeatureCAM for many years and am exited to be responsible for bringing automation into HSM. As a first project, we thought hole making and drilling would be a good place to start.

Here is a short screencast showing where we are currently with drilling automation. We are continuing work on automation to allow for multiple operations/operation types to be created for a single cylinder, this would allow for, say, a spot drill and a drill operation to be created automatically.

we would love to hear any thoughts.

[al.whatmough]

Thanks for posting @aaron.williford  Looking foward to hearing feedback on this!

[scottmoyse]

Cool to see this moving forwards! Can I ask what are the differences between this implementation and what we see in HSMWorks at this stage?

[al.whatmough]

@scottmoyse You are correct, a lot of this first phase is similar to what we have in HSMWorks.

[ArjanDijk]

Very cool @aaron.williford and @al.whatmough. What would be needed is defining the tools based on the properties of the hole.

If its a thead hole it should have a center-drill-tap chain op operations on that hole. To make it a bit more complex, you need to be able to choose this chain. Sometimes center-drill-tap, sometimes center - drill - threadmill, sometimes bore - threadmill

[aaron.williford]

 @ArjanDijk you are correct. The first version does not take any of that into consideration, just creates a simple drilling operation for each cylinder found. However, future versions are working toward incorporating the more complex hole making operations automatically. Thanks for looking and making a great suggestion.

[scottmoyse]

Agreed Arjan, and this comes back to my idea that the CAM need access to all the CAD model parameters.

[aaron.williford]

@scottmoyse - so you're thinking along the lines of hole metadata?

[scottmoyse]

hi Aaron,

It might be best if we have a 30 minute sharing session next week so I can show you some stuff. I'll send you an email.

[ArjanDijk]

@scottmoyse. Can you record and share this? 

[martin_walter]

Will there be a development version or some kind of tech preview for Inventor to play around with?

Best regards,

Martin

[fredsi]

Aaron,

Sorry, little late to the party. Glad to see this in development. As veteran users of FeatureCam/Delcam for Solidworks, the lack of a comprehensive drill wizard function is the main sticking point in getting our programmers to switch away from FC/DFS to Fusion. Feature recognition for milling features such as pockets, contours, etc. is a much more debatable issue IMHO.

I realize you are early in development, but would like to ask:  1) how do you plan to handle patterns of holes? Right now you are creating the individual holes and presumably they can be patterned with existing options, but would be nice to auto create pattern based on hole type, depth of hole, orientation, etc. 2) Would suggest that you go back to the Fusion gang and have them create a hole type called 'precision' or something of the sort, so the metadata can eventually reflect this and allow you to pull reamers - this was a long time coming in Solidworks which then provided the info to DFS for adding reamer selection to the automatic tool selection process.

We do a lot of hole drilling (Breadboards for mounting scientific equipment, optics, etc.). Suffice to say we are looking forward to this implementation and would love to test the functionality as it becomes available. Thanks.

Fred

[aaron.williford]

 UPDATE!!

We have established a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for automated hole making and recognition in Fusion360, see the video below. I'd love some feedback.

@fredsi - I think this addresses your question about what we are going to do about patterns of holes.

[fredsi]

Aaron,


Will need to look at the video a few more times, but seems very promising. The one item I don't see mentioned is 'sort order' when doing a large number of identical holes. For example, we do a lot of breadboards for mounting microscope equipment or optical hardware. Thus, we're looking at regular patterns of 200-300 tapped holes. IIRC, FeatureCam had ability to sort +X direction, -X direction, +Y direction....ad nauseam and shortest path. Plus the ability to reverse the pattern for next tool.


As a member of CAB, have access to hole wizard dev and will give it a workout in present form. Thanks for opportunity to comment.


Fred

[scottmoyse]

Hi Aaron,

I don't think Elevation & Azimuth are all that descriptive for most users. Is there a better name to call those?

[aaron.williford]

Open for suggestions, we have been trying to come up with good naming for those columns. Note that the "Elevation" is from setup Z+, not the XY plane as Elevation usually is.

[scottmoyse]

Can you explain here how they work with some diagrams maybe? Then we can thrash it out.

[fredsi]

Aaron,

Can one assume:

1) Azimuth is measured from X+ (of X axis)

2) That holes recognized in, say 5 axis parts, will automatically have their 'tool orientation' axes created?

Thanks,

Fred

[aaron.williford]

I'll do my best to describe what Elevation and Azimuth are and how they work. In the world of 5-axis, the machine really has 5 degrees of freedom (it can move in X, Y, and Z, but it can also rotate around the X axis and the Z axis (A &B)). This means, that we have to think of the coordinate system in terms of sphere rather than the flat-ish Cartesian coordinate system that we normally think in the the world of 3-axis. So let's start with Elevation.....

Elevation is used to describe an angle from the X-Y plane, as the angle moves toward the Z+ axis this is a positive elevation angle. In other terms, if you look to the east from where you are standing, anything at the horizon is an elevation of 0 degrees. As you follow the same pattern of the earths rotation (east to west), you are changing the elevation. At the point that an object is directly above you for example, the elevation is 90 degrees, when that same object (the sun or a star) is on the western horizon, it is now at 180 degrees in elevation. We typically only think of elevation in terms of 0 - 90 degrees because we have another axis to describe anything beyond 90 degrees, Azimuth.

Azimuth is the angle of an object on the X-Y plane relative to X+. So, let's think of this in terms of our earth and sun/star example we used to describe the Elevation. When you look to the east, anything at the horizon is, as we know, at an elevation of 0 degrees, however due east is also X+, therefore the object at the horizon is also at an Azimuth of 0 degrees. Rotation of the azimuth is typically Counter Clockwise from X+, if you look to the Northern horizon, you are looking at an azimuth angle of 90 degrees (remember, +90 degrees because the rotation is CCW from X+). If you look to the western horizon, you are looking at an azimuth angle 180 degrees, the southern horizon would be an azimuth angle of 270 degrees.

Remember the example of following an object with rotation of the earth, when that object is setting in the western horizon, I said that it was at an elevation of 180 degrees, but the typical way to describe it as an elevation of 0 degrees, but an azimuth of 180 degrees.

Now the tricky part, in terms if elevation and hole making, we believe that the more valuable angle for users to know is from Z+. Meaning that we have set the elevation relative to Z+ as 0 degrees, moving toward the X-Y plane is a positive elevation angle. While the graphic I am using only shows from Z+ to X+ and X-, the same applies from Z+ to Y+ and Y- as they are part of the X-Y plane.

Does that make things a bit more clear, or did I just muddy the water more?

[ArjanDijk]

Wow @aaron.williford. If I read really closely I get it, but it will be hard to explain it in the dialog. 

The dialog you show in the video looks really promising. Nice work! One thing I miss (and I miss it in all of HSM) is the ability to replace a tool for multiple operations. If you recognize a drill hole on 5 sides, it will make 5 operations. If you decide afterwards that you need a different tool for this operation (because of material/availebility etc) you need to change it 5 times by hand for each operation. Would be great if you use this introduction to also introduce a batch-tool-replace

[scottmoyse]

@aaron.williford that cleared it up perfectly for me with some careful reading. So.. Elevation is the angle from Z+ relative to the XY plane (0 being aligned to the setup WCS axis, in HSM world at least), and Azimuth is the angle of rotation around the Z axis from X+. 

What is the value in knowing which holes have both non-zero Elevation & Azimuth?

And a great example of what Arjan is talking about would be programming a fixed drilling head on a router. The horizontal drilling blocks may both have 5mm drills in them of the same specification, but different tool numbers. In that case, I would imagine the Azimuth filters of 90,180,270 would be very handy, and for the azimuth of 0 position, in HSM world, it would show an elevation of +90. Correct? Then you could apply a different template to each group? Or would all those holes be recognised in the same group because they have the same signature (albeit at different orientations)?