This blog post will cover Mastercam Multi-threading and how it can accelerate your toolpath creation. To understand multithreading, we first must know what a processor is and how that processor uses cores and threads. The processor is what carries out the individual tasks assigned by the application. Early computers only could only process one instruction at a time, because they had one core. Now, processors can have multiple cores and each core can carry out individual tasks. The more cores you have, the more tasks your computer can perform simultaneously. Cores can have multiple threads thereby multiplying the ability of your processor to carry out tasks by the number of threads it can process. So how does this affect you when using Mastercam? Prior to Mastercam 2024, you couldn’t utilize multi-threading capabilities. This meant that whenever you completed or regenerated a toolpath you were unable to make another toolpath until that path had completed generation. Now with multithreading, Mastercam divides the workload between your cores, sending tasks to those cores via threads and allowing you to continue programming. To illustrate how this works we will look at the toolpaths in Mastercam that can utilize multi-threading. Then we will determine how many cores our [...]

Mastercam has multiple tools for measuring and gathering information from your geometry. Some of these tools also include additional functions like the Mastercam Analyze Entity tool. This article will explore how to use this tool. You can access the Analyze Entity utility by selecting Home/Analyze/Utility from the main menu. Alternatively, you can also launch it from the right-click menu, or use the F4 key to launch it at any time. After selecting the entities, you are given most of the information that you would normally expect to see. For Circles, you will see the diameter and the center point location. For Lines, you will see the length and the positions of the endpoints. One thing you can do with Analyze Entity is make changes to the entities themselves. You can reposition the circles, change the diameter, and even change the arc sweep. For Lines, you can change the length, flip point 1 and point 2, and also reselect the points used to create the line. There is a useful feature to assist in editing multiple arcs at once. If you select one arc and hit F4 while Analyze Entity is open, you can select the next arc you want to look at. You [...]