Monday, 21 December 2020

Fusion add-in: resolving issues with Swissi's probing post processor - DOH!

Que?

I had the very devil of a job getting the final version of Tim's add-in to work with the latest (current) version of Swissi's post processor. This incorporates loads of configurable options and the in-process probing functions he has implemented. 

I found I was able to get the add-in to work fine with the beta versions he provided me when he was developing his enhanced post processor but the final version ("003") consistently bombed out when I tried to post multiple operations, which is rather the point of Tim's mods. Gah!! 

I narrowed the problem within my files to the inclusion of drilling cycles. There may have been other operations that caused problems but even a test file with just drilling showed the problem up.

Finally, I saw sense and downloaded and reinstalled the current version from the Centroid forum and sure enough, it worked fine. Job done, problem gone....

Doing a file compare within Visual Studio Code shows that there wasn't any massive change as such - but clearly some tidying up went on before Swissi released the post to the wild.

To do this, you go File > Open folder... then select a folder containing the files you want to compare (including files within any subdirectories). Then click to select the files you are interested in, right click and "select for compare". VSC is clever enough to open them side by side in separate windows, conveniently synchronised and highlighted. Nice - a lot easier than some clunky old Unix diff command.

I will need to spend some time to understand this in detail but the fundamental changes that ARE evident seem to be moving around some of the multiaxis stuff. Glad to see the door appears to still open for multi-axis operation still (he didn't simply delete it all, which might have been a nice way to "tidy up" the contents), although I'm guessing for now it's going to be limited to indexing only. 

What's the cause?

Can't pretend I could put my finger on a particular line of code, 'cos I couldn't if I tried. However, there's enough changes here to suggest to me that 

Released ("003") post on the left - "broken" (beta 3) on the right:

Title change:


Add some variables:


Create a tool checking macro to go in the g-code at run time:


This is the multi-axis stuff. Not present in this part of the beta:


It seems to have come from later in the beta file ie moved forward in 003:



Reset rotary axis:

Ah well. 

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