Offline to online runtime calculator

I've spent about the last year and a half writing an application library for our estimating software to do the same, except for lathe cycle times.

Consistency in your inspection methods is hugely important if you want to go this route for cycle time estimates. Our lathe programs are written using a .Net application, so the rules that are always in effect in our lathe programs were easy enough to extract and put into the estimating code: we always rapid to .2" then .04" in 'Z' in front of the part, we divide stock to be removed into the fewest number of passes that don't exceed a depth-of-cut limit, we break the finish profile into certain movements, etc.

Personally, I would investigate the animation settings in the PC-DMIS setup options (F5) to see if these can be tuned to match the performance of your CMMs. We used the simulation capabilities of our CAM software, Esprit, as a baseline to test my estimating library. Because of the focus of our product line and the volume a part numbers we quote, it was beneficial for us to write a piece of standalone code to do the same thing.

I've spent about the last year and a half writing an application library for our estimating software to do the same, except for lathe cycle times.

Consistency in your inspection methods is hugely important if you want to go this route for cycle time estimates. Our lathe programs are written using a .Net application, so the rules that are always in effect in our lathe programs were easy enough to extract and put into the estimating code: we always rapid to .2" then .04" in 'Z' in front of the part, we divide stock to be removed into the fewest number of passes that don't exceed a depth-of-cut limit, we break the finish profile into certain movements, etc.

Personally, I would investigate the animation settings in the PC-DMIS setup options (F5) to see if these can be tuned to match the performance of your CMMs. We used the simulation capabilities of our CAM software, Esprit, as a baseline to test my estimating library. Because of the focus of our product line and the volume a part numbers we quote, it was beneficial for us to write a piece of standalone code to do the same thing.