Tool Manager

I made this tool manager for the second generation QtDragon, but there's no reason it couldn't be a standalone application. Currently, you can assign tools to groups, such as Drills, spiral upcuts, whatever. Each tool can be assigned material specific cutting parameters and the running time for each tool is tracked according to how long it was in the spindle while a program was running. The linuxcnc tool table is the source of truth and tools can only be added or removed by editing the tool table. The database can be exported to csv or html.  I'm not a machinist, so this was only a guess on my part about what kind of data to record. Looking for suggestions on features, changes, etc. Regards.
Jim
 

Seems like a cool project but not really relevant. My tool manager is just a plugin for the QtDragon screen to manage metadata for the linuxcnc tool table. It is not concerned with synchronizing other tool table formats, though if it did, I think Fusion360 and Vectric databases would be good candidates.

hey persei8

i am the guy who messaged on facebook about this

this looks awesome

would be great to set this up on a cnc mill when i get time

cheers

Andrew

Did you add it to the LinuxCNC repo or do you plan so?
Would be nice to have it in the sources if not already there.

The UI looks fine and exporting tool wear/runtime data in a .csv file is operationally quite useful in a production shop. However, what is the use case for adding tool geometry and cutting data in LinuxCNC? I can see it being useful if the intention is to go deep into adding conversational CAM features, but that's it. With the latter, you'd also want to consider attaching a dxf for each cutter profile.

Honestly, synchronizing tooling parameters (what you might call metadata?) between different CAM software is a huge pain. Handling multiple machines, materials, cutter geometries is actually a deep rabbit hole. In practice, feeds and speeds are job-specific. For the controller, I populate the tool number, tool diameter, tool length, and description. That's it. I address everything else in CAM or directly or when writing the g-code.

With regards to tool databases and github.com/loobric/smooth-core. Neither Fusion (zipped json files) nor Vectric (now an sqlite3 file) define their tool database specification so they are always subject to change. According to their software license, they are proprietary. I've written python scripts for managing my library of tools within both but they do break with updates. I'd love to see this improve with a common specification/format being adopted, but I don't see the business case for any CAM software company. Ultimately, why make it easier for users to switch CAM software?