I have a 2014 DMU65 with Siemens 840D SL control. The path compression package came included with the controller, and it definitely works quite well. CYCLE832 + COMPCURV is very nice.
Although I have NX 11, I use Grasshopper in Rhino to make 5-axis toolpaths for aesthetic effects with ball nose mills on generative geometry. There are a handful of cases where incident curves can be represented exactly with NURBS, but cubic spline ("akima" splines) and bspline is always possible. Right now, I'm sampling NURBS surfaces and outputting linear path segments - just plain G1 commands with unit vector (A3, B3, C3) tool orientation.
Fitting tangent continuous cubic segments or bsplines and outputting these as CSPLINE or BSPLINE in X, Y, Z, XH, YH, ZH, PL format has proven tougher than I anticipated. Before dumping more hours into this, I'm curious to know if anyone has found situations where witness marks can only be avoided by using spline paths. Is 840D compression so good that I can totally lean on it and stick with linear paths? So far, I'm happy. I'm worried that I'll find out that I do need splines at some point and end up blowing deadlines in order to implement it under duress.
Although I have NX 11, I use Grasshopper in Rhino to make 5-axis toolpaths for aesthetic effects with ball nose mills on generative geometry. There are a handful of cases where incident curves can be represented exactly with NURBS, but cubic spline ("akima" splines) and bspline is always possible. Right now, I'm sampling NURBS surfaces and outputting linear path segments - just plain G1 commands with unit vector (A3, B3, C3) tool orientation.
Fitting tangent continuous cubic segments or bsplines and outputting these as CSPLINE or BSPLINE in X, Y, Z, XH, YH, ZH, PL format has proven tougher than I anticipated. Before dumping more hours into this, I'm curious to know if anyone has found situations where witness marks can only be avoided by using spline paths. Is 840D compression so good that I can totally lean on it and stick with linear paths? So far, I'm happy. I'm worried that I'll find out that I do need splines at some point and end up blowing deadlines in order to implement it under duress.