This collection of instructional videos is all about PowerSource technology. PowerSource is a technology that dynamically makes decisions
about proper program parameters and machining methodology. You'll learn how to influence the decisions made by PowerSource to establish
machining parameters automatically using the application programs Insight and Tooling. To truly maximize your investment in Prospector,
you should work extensively with Insight to capture your machining expertise and enforce your shop rules in the a PowerSource database.
PowerSource Insight - Programming Your Machining Preferences
PowerSource Insight is an application program that allows you to make changes to the PowerSource databases. In this video Kevin will demonstrate
how to make changes to the user database to put into place defaults for machining that you prefer.
PowerSource Insight - More About Program Properties
A deeper look into how to program rules to setup the properties for a program. You'll learn how to use expressions and other properties in a program
to establish value or setting. We'll use the Common Expressions pane to access variables associated with a program and you'll also see how
to use a Function to calculate a value. We'll also delve into Tool Selection and you'll learn how to influence the selection to come up with
a reasonable tool selection for the current machining conditions.
A deeper look inside of PowerSource Tooling. You'll see how the tooling database is organized. Learn how to add a new tool, edit an existing tool,
delete a tool and modify speeds, feeds and CNC properties for a tool. We'll also look at creating tool assembly components to make it a cinch to
model an entire assembly in Prospector.
PowerSource Insight - Creating Rules with Conditionals
A conditional tests one or more statements to determine what value to assign to a particular setting. This is a very powerful aspect
of PowerSource that you can make work to your advantage to choose the best possible program parameter. You'll see how you can program
a rule that will look at the stock condition inside of a window to determine what the default machining strategy should be for that window.
You'll learn how to use the built-in rule builder dialog to build conditional statements, use operators and access variables.
PowerSource Insight - Creating and Using a New User Database
In this video, you'll see how to create a new user database and tell Prospector to start using it. Creating different user databases can make sense
especially
in situations where multiple users are creating programs on the same computer. For example, the day shift programmer may have different ideas and preferences
for machining than the night shift. Fine. Let the day shift user create and use his own user
database and the night shift user gets his own.
PowerSource Insight - Creating New Materials and Configurations
Learn how to create new material types and configurations in your PowerSource system database. As an example, you'll see how to add Graphite as a
material type and Electrode as a configuration. To get started, you'll learn how to copy all the rules from an existing configuration to populate
the new configuration which will save you a lot of time. We will also show you in PowerSource Tooling how to begin populating your new
material type with tooling information.
Feature-based machining allows you to define a series of 2D holemaking programs. Based on the characteristics of the feature the proper tool and program
parameters can be determined automatically. In short, if the part is designed right, it will be machined right! If you do a lot of holemaking, setting up
your own feature-based machining sequences is going to be a huge time-saver.
Remachining is the creation of multiple programs each one with a tool size smaller than the previous one. Each program in a remachining sequence attacks
the stock left behind by the previous programs(s) (i.e. go into those areas where the programs with larger tools could not go). In this video you'll see how
to setup a remachining sequence for roughing out a job.
Custom properties is a way to capture information that needs to be part of a Prospector project. For example, you may wish to capture the
name of the programmer who created a project. This can be done with a PowerSource custom property. You'll see how bits of information you
can collect can be made mandatory. Information about the entire project, a setup or an individual program can be captured. Information
collected can be output in a printed form to document your processes or forwarded to the post processor for output as a comment to the
tape file.
PowerSource Insight - Locking Rules and Settings
Many shops have certain shop rules and best practices that must be followed to ensure safety and quality standards are upheld. That's where locked rules
and settings in PowerSource comes in handy. For example, if all finishing programs must use a tolerance of 0.0002" you can set that specific tolerance
in the system database and lock it so that no matter what, every program produced in the finish stage of machining will use 0.0002" for a tolerance. The
programmers can not override the setting! This is a very powerful tool to ensure everyone is on the same page as far as programming standards are
concerned and goes a long way to avoiding errors.
When you are working with PowerSource Insight, you are actually writing code (programming). The programming language is Visual Basic Script - a scripting
technology created by Microsoft. Programming in computer code can be maddening because you must be precise! Syntax errors because you forgot a closing
parentheses or didn't properly quote a string are common. Logic errors are even more difficult to debug. In this video you'll learn a few techniques
to help you out when things go wrong (and they will) so you can get to the source of the problem and make appropriate corrections to your code.
