Map Materials and CAM Pages
Materials
The Map > Material command brings up the Edit Material dialogue. This can be used to:
- Assign a bent material to the selected material
- Edit alternate names (aliases) of a material
- Edit alternate names of materials.
Bend-material – The factory materials defined in Praxis may be different from the known materials defined in Bend. Praxis assigns the mapped bend material to the part before sending it to the Bend Engine for bend CAM.
Aliases – Enter an alias name of the material, one per line, in the Aliases textbox. When importing new parts, these aliases are used to map the external material names like ERP, CAD systems etc. to the one defined in Praxis. This is a many-to-one map where multiple aliases can be assigned to a single material.
Raw-material Aliases – Like material aliases, raw-material aliases allow the provision of alternate names for materials and thicknesses. These short names later can be used in a spreadsheet to provide a single entry for both material and thickness.
Export and Import – These commands can be used to assign mappings in a batch. The exported file is a simple key-value CSV file which can then be re-imported.
CAM Pages
When a new laser, hybrid, or water jet machine is added to the factory route, Praxis checks if the target machine contains the technology table for all available factory raw materials (material and thickness). Praxis prompts the user with the page mapping UI if it does not find them. The page mapping can then be used to map the factory material to the laser pages. The page-mapping dialogue can also be launched from the machine settings panel using the Map Pages… command and from the sheets factory settings page using the Map CAM Pages command. Later, the mapping UI for all factory materials is launched. The mapping dialogue displays factory raw material on the left and laser pages on the right. Mapping can be performed between the material and the pages of the same machine. An orange colour means a missing entry, implying that the raw material cannot be produced on the target machine.
Mapping can be performed at two levels:
Factory Material -> Technology Material – When a factory material is mapped to a technology material, Praxis searches the technology pages for raw materials (thicknesses) from the factory set. If a match is found, it is mapped (in the green status colour). To perform this mapping, select the material node on the left and double-click the material node on the right, or use the Assign command. As the image below displays, thicknesses 1, 1.5, 2, etc. are found in the technology entries on the right. When you select a mapped node on the left, its map appears on the right.
Technology Page -> Factory Raw Material (material + thickness) – The raw material on the left can be mapped to the technology pages on the right. To perform this mapping, select the node on the left and double-click (or select and assign) the page node on the right. As displayed in the image below, such maps are displayed with an arrow key.
Auto-Assign Command – When this command is used, the page lookup is done with a thickness-scaled fudge. This is useful in mapping inch thicknesses to metric pages and vice versa. For a thickness of 1 mm, the fudge value is.03 mm. Hence, this allows 1 mm of steel to be mapped to a page created for 0.04 inches of steel (STEEL #18).
The command button is disabled if no such fudged mapping is possible.
Reset mapping – command erases the mapping table and resets it back to default. The mapping table is also used to select the appropriate raw material sheet during the nesting.
Edit Page – This command can be used to edit an individual page or a set of all pages under a material node. When the individual page is edited, you can change parameters like material, thickness, etc. The material node can be edited to change the machine or material of the whole batch under the node. The edit dialogue displays the new and old values of the selected page(s), and pressing OK applies the changes to the laser database.
Copy Page – This command can be used to copy existing page(s) to a new material or machine node. The same UI is presented with controls to change page parameters.
Remove Page – This command can be used to remove selected pages.
Press OK to apply the changes to the MetaCAM laser database. The cancel command cancels all edits, leaving the config.dat unchanged.
The search box can be used to find the LTT page based on the input text provided.
Map CAM LTT Pages through the Spreadsheet
The bulk Raw-Material to CAM page (LTT) mapping can be performed using the mapping Export/Import.
Use the Export/Import button to:
- Export the page mappings to the RawMaterialCAMPageMap.csv and CAM pages to the CAMPages.csv file. The mapping file contains one entry each for the Machine + Praxis raw materials and the mapped CAM page. The CAM page entry is left blank for the unmapped entries.
- Update the RawMaterialCAMPageMap.csv file with the CAM page entries for CAMMaterial, CAMThickness, and CAMPage columns. These values can be located in the CAMPages.csv file. Leave the CAMPage entry blank for MetaCAM machines if the page description is not available.
- Now import the updated spreadsheet to create the mapping.
