David Stanton and I spent some time at the Tormach yesterday including a good 2 hours beating our heads against what I like to call the Path Pilot wall of frustration… but I think we emerged victorious.
We discovered some very interesting behaviors around editing conversational mode operations. In fact it’s possible that this behavior may have been (at least for me) the source of a lot of head scratching in the past. A brief description is this… To EDIT an operation that you’ve previously saved, there is literally a different way to go into the operation called (Convedit) so that you can see the values from your saved op in the console. Instead of hitting Load, like I always thought, we noticed a button called “Convedit”. When you click this, it opens the operation in a different window essentially. In that window, you can edit only that single operation and update any changes into the original file. But you must finalize and close that window before you can actually run the operation. See pics below.
In all honesty, it’s rather non-intuitive but now that we figured it out, it may go a long way to eliminating a lot of question marks.
One additional thing that is almost imparative is to build your own library of tools and to save it along with any ops that you save. Without it, the next time you launch path pilot, the tools will inevitably be different because of others clearing and setting up one-off tools for one-off ops.
The real problem is that if you just hit the Load button, it will in fact load the saved op and you would be able to start the cycle, assuming the tool libraries and offsets still match. But what you see in the conversational tab will NOT match what is running in the cycle. Like I said, very unintuitive. In fact, the last screen shot sort of starts to help explain the difference between this Convedit mode and the standard way i’ve always used the console. You can see in the last shot that I navigated to the “Main” tab which is where you would naturally go to run the Cycle. But you can see that they put a new unique message on the screen telling you that you must exit the Convedit mode before you can do anything else.
And last but not least, we upgraded PathPilot to version 2.10.1. The version we were running was from over 2 years ago. There are a few small screen changes and new features now, including the ability to leverage a camera in some way to record operations…
