Autodesk HSM Post Editor for Visual Studio Code goes live

[fonsecr]

Hi all post developers,

We just pushed Autodesk HSM Post Editor for Visual Studio Code live as an Open Source project under the MIT license. Check it out at:

https://github.com/Autodesk/cam-posteditor

This project is an extension for Visual Studio Code that makes life much easier when developing posts.

You can get the installation for Visual Studio Code at:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Autodesk.hsm-post-processor

@GeorgeRoberts has been working on this until now. But my hope is that we can work together as a community to make it even better. So if you are interested in contributing make sure to engage. Of course you are welcome to just make requests for the post team also. You can use the post idea station for such requests.

Note that you need to sign a small agreement before we can accept contributions.See the README for details.

George will post introduction to the extension here.

[Anonymous]

I get two different Errors, i dont know why

maybe the german client is a problem?

[GeorgeRoberts]

Thanks for the reply.

The one issue is asking you to select your post executable, just click the 'browse' button and select the post.exe from your install folder (you can see this in the overview video above).

you can only start the extension when the .cps is in the active view, which is why the first image shows it failing.

[LibertyMachine]

I finally had time to stopped getting wrapped up in so many other shop tasks and had time to install and start using this. Very nice.

Quick problem I ran into: It's not prompting me for units (MM or IMP), rather it's just posting out in metric. I did a search but did not yield any results

At first I thought it was my post (I've made many edits to it) but it's doing it with otherwise stock posts as well

[GeorgeRoberts]

Glad you got time to try it out! I decided to change the prompt to be a user setting instead. The prompt would be fairly frustrating when you want to just keep the same units.

To change the setting, click F1 and type 'user settings', this will open up your settings object. From that, you can add the following:

To use mm, just change IN to MM.

Hope this helps!

[MJK_Performance]

Loving this so far, though I have an issue were it runs perfectly on my PC but on my mac it wont find any functions, variables or anything under the CNC selector, It wont find the post utility either. Its my first time using visual studio Code so I might be doing something wrong on the mac side of things.

[GeorgeRoberts]

Hi @MJK_Performance,

There are some known issues on when running this on a MAC. It's on the plan to properly support the MAC environment

Cheers

[daniel_lyall]

@GeorgeRoberts Question the way the 4th axis code is done in some off the post now like below, how do you post process 4th axis code from Visual studio it just chucks an error

if (properties.fourthAxisAround != "none") {
var aAxis = createAxis({coordinate:0, table:true, axis:[(properties.fourthAxisAround == "x" ? -1 : 0), (properties.fourthAxisAround == "y" ? -1 : 0), 0], cyclic:true, preference:0});
machineConfiguration = new MachineConfiguration(aAxis);

[GeorgeRoberts]

Hi @daniel_lyall,

For this you would currently need to set the property inside of the post processor. I have an idea for how we could better support post properties within VSCode (giving you the ability to set them when posting). I'll discuss it with the team and see if it makes sense to add such support

Cheers

[daniel_lyall]

I tried doing that it failed, I may have set it in the wrong places.

[GeorgeRoberts]

Which post is it you are using? I'll give it a try here

[daniel_lyall]

The newest Mach3 post

[GeorgeRoberts]

Strange, mine seems to work fine. I changed:

fourthAxisAround: "none" // specifies the fourth axis if mounted

To this:

fourthAxisAround: "x" // specifies the fourth axis if mounted

[daniel_lyall]

That's what I tried.

I just tried again it was failing I tried a few 4 axis G Codes I have that are along X, I tried the one and only Y axis one I have and it worked and now the X axis ones are working, what a pain.

[GeorgeRoberts]

Very strange... I'll do some investigation here to see if I can find out what might of caused that

[daniel_lyall]

@GeorgeRoberts  Does this program work on a apple computer.

I am getting sick to death of Windows 10 and need to move to Apple if it does on Apple then all my day to day programs are on apple.

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

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@daniel_lyall wrote:

@GeorgeRoberts  Does this program work on a apple computer.

I am getting sick to death of Windows 10 and need to move to Apple if it does on Apple then all my day to day programs are on apple.

---

Don't think your problems were because of windows.

But Visual Studio Code is available for MAC as well.

And as long as you have a post.exe it should work right?

[daniel_lyall]

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Don't think your problems were because of windows. ??????????

But Visual Studio Code is available for MAC as well.

And as long as you have a post.exe it should work right?

---

Win10 keeps making things go wrong on my computer's (nothing to do with Fusion or VSC at all) the computer its self. 

[GeorgeRoberts]

The extension doesn't work on the MAC OS at the moment. There are several differences in the OS that prevent this plugin from functioning correctly.

[makko74]

@GeorgeRoberts

Hi George or someone who knows it,

short question.

Is there a parameter that I can control that the post.exe window is visible during the post process?
Sometimes my postprocessor issues messages ( using the alert command, promptKey2 ) and then waits for an OK or input. If the post.exe window is not visible, I can not give an OK either and the post.exe waits in the background.

Hope its understandable what i mean.

Thanks in advance

Mario

[GeorgeRoberts]

Hey @makko74,

this might be possible. The extension uses the following parameter when calling post.exe:

"--quiet",

You can remove this parameter inside of the extension in the file extension.js file here:

C:\Users\YOUR USERNAME\.vscode\extensions\autodesk.hsm-post-processor-2.0.6\out\src

Is this common for your posts? I could add it as a setting if needed