Defining prohibitive areas on Haas VFCs (DT-1)

Hi folks!

Does someone know is there any way to define a prohibitive area (a virtual parallelepiped) on Haas mills ?

We recently set up 4th axis (HRC210) on our DT-1 milling machine. After some practicing I decided it would be a good idea to programmatically limit machine from entering into some area to avoid collisions by unexperienced operator performing jogging or executing a poorly written program. I tried to set "X max limit" setting, but it did not work and here's why: physical travel space on this particular machine for X axis is in [-508; 0] area. When you set a limit to anything bigger than -508 (the obstacle I want to avoid resides at -186), you prevent machine from entering its home position (0) or a tool change position (-250), which seems not allowed. I could not find any other setting or an option to implement my idea. I been told there is such feature on Haas lathes which preserves tailstock.

Regards,
Ruslan.

Train your operators/setup people...?

I think there is a parameter to force an X and/or Y move, before a toolchange, to accommodate a trunnion, but other than that I don't know...

Nope, not that I know of. Never seen anything like that on a mill

Does this video help?
From Haas tip of the day
YouTube

IWUP said:

Does this video help?
From Haas tip of the day
YouTube

Click to expand...

Well, that tip solves only part of the problem - a possible collision during tool change. For me it looks like a dirty hack rather than a conventional solution . What is needed is a way to define one or more prohibitive areas machine should avoid. From my point, as a long time system programmer and electronics engineer, this feature can be easily implemented, machine has all the data at hand: current tool length and diameter, current position and target position. If target hits into any of such pre-define prohibitive areas machine should stop and pop up an error. I'm quite surprised nobody at Haas bothered to implements this obvious feature for more than 30 years of selling VMCs. Anyways, thank you for the link.

Regards,
Ruslan.

pointcheck said:

Well, that tip solves only part of the problem - a possible collision during tool change. For me it looks like a dirty hack rather than a conventional solution . What is needed is a way to define one or more prohibitive areas machine should avoid. From my point, as a long time system programmer and electronics engineer, this feature can be easily implemented, machine has all the data at hand: current tool length and diameter, current position and target position. If target hits into any of such pre-define prohibitive areas machine should stop and pop up an error. I'm quite surprised nobody at Haas bothered to implements this obvious feature for more than 30 years of selling VMCs. Anyways, thank you for the link.

Regards,
Ruslan.

Click to expand...

Ok.. so I don't want to be a jerk here, but I think what you are asking is a little... much..? How would the machine know what your fixture, tool lengths (relative to the fixture), etc are? What is wrong with driving the machine to a safe position before each tool change? As an aside, I once told a setup guy "DO NOT do a tool change with this tool unless you have the machine to xx/yy position, he immediately did a tool change above the part and wrecked the drill (long aircraft type).

Now, there was just a thread about a fancy heidenhein(?) control with a camera system that could detect from pics if a setup was right or not (if I understood it), but I believe that was a 5 axis (expensive! 5 axis I'm sure!).

Mastercam does have a safety feature you can use to avoid certain areas, but I don't think I have ever used it.

Mike, there's nothing wrong with moving machine to safe position during tool change, we use it already (everyone uses this feature I believe), but that was not the issue I am trying to resolve. What I concern about is possible collision during set up (you can crash simply by jogging) and protect against possible collisions caused by bugs in my (and some other guys') programs.

Implementing collision detection could be easily implemented this way. When you install some fixture or a rotary you go to some setting or a submenu to define one or more prohibitive areas by entering X,Y,Z coordinates of two corners per each area (a volume) where your fixture resides. Machine always keeps tracking of its current tool tip position using data from G43 Hxx - this is already done, you can see it all the way on your control main screen. Now what is needed is a check for destination (target) position agains a list of prohibitive areas. If target enters any of the areas (this is basic geomerty), the movement must be cancelled with an error. What's interesting, such check is alreay there. For instance, if you try to move using G-code beyond your travels the control will immediately stop with an error. Why not to extend this feature and make it a bit more useful ?

All those fancy camers are comepletely useless and should be avoided on small or mid sized VMCs as long as the setup is visible to an operator. There are some really huge machines where operator physically unable to observe all the stuff located inside of machine working area. In such a case camers can be of help of course.

Regards,
Ruslan.

maybe you're looking for something called "user travel limits", or you could probably use a second home position in a clever way.

there might also be a solution between setup mode and run mode (the key on the side), which changes what people can and cannot do at the control.

If your operators are doing setup they’re not operators they’re machinists and if your machinists can’t do setups then they should just be an operator. If your programs are so sketchy that distance to go, rapid override, single block and feedhold aren’t enough you might need to rethink the program.

You’re not going to find features like collision avoidance on a Haas but it is available on Okuma lathes and possibly newer mills but those aren’t priced like a Haas.