Do the Undoable in Mastercam with Excel and Scripts

Like other machining nerds out there, I'm constantly perusing online forums and user groups about machining and Mastercam. This is where I found the idea for this video. I just may use forum ideas for future videos as I often struggle with content ideas for these videos. So, ya, feel free to leave your ideas for videos to help me out!
The topic starter was asking about how to offset/translate a hole 100x but have the distance between the holes get larger for each individual move. So a distance between holes 1 and 2 of 0.500, holes 2 and 3 of 0.5156, holes 3 and 4 of 0.5312 etc. This is not something you can do with a normal Translate inside of Mastercam. However, we can use some tools in Mastercam to perform this function.
First in this video, I look at importing a CSV file. CSV files can contain the XYZ coordinates of the points you wish to create. So, we can use a program like Excel to generate the numbers of the coordinates we need. Excel is a very powerful software and can be extremely useful for machinists in many different aspects of their jobs. I highly recommend exploring Excel for tasks beyond this example. Once we create the points in Excel, we can open this file with Mastercam and it will create the points for us.
Second, scripting. Now VBScripting is all but dead going forward. It does work in Mastercam now but this is being replaced with .net scripting so I would not suggest putting much into this at this point. I've used it here simply because I have not explored the net scripting yet. Alternatively, this could go directly into a chook as well but this will be a bunch more work than a simple script. Scripts allows us to use programming languages to loop and adjust point positions and have Mastercam create these points programmatically for us.
In closing, just remember, just because there isn't a button or function that doesn't do exactly what you want, this doesn't mean Mastercam isn't able to do it. Sometimes you have to get into these 'extra' tools and make your own functions.
If you have another idea on how to accomplish the offsetting described, please share. I'm sure there's another option out there we did not look at here.
0:00 Intro
1:30 Review of the tasks
3:40 CSV files and Excel
9:06 Scripting
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[@chazz.zaragoza.9561]

That's a neat trick

[@haroldjoubert1986]

This is excellent never new this is possible. 👍 Please do a more in depth video on this and maybe refer more to the net script way. Thank you caminstructor as always sharing important information for Mastercam users 👍

[@CamInstructor]

Will be looking into net scripting very soon

[@chazz.zaragoza.9561]

@@CamInstructor Will you be covering making custom C hooks at any point??

[@CamInstructor]

At some point, yes.

[@manojvishwakarma-instructo4612]

Informative 👍

[@CamInstructor]

Glad you think so!

[@theking-dn3sv]

Awesome man thanks!

[@CamInstructor]

Thank you!

[@loanpanda0763]

Superb sir

[@CamInstructor]

Thanks!

[@johnny1b099]

Great information! But I think you missed the easiest and quickest way to accomplish your example task - use transform to create 100 copies of the point, then scale with the scale origin at the first point using a scale factor of (.5 + .156)/.5. Boom - done!

[@CamInstructor]

You are on to something here but as described this does not work. The points will keep an even spacing during the scale move, unless I'm overlooking something. Doing a Copy during the Scale kind of works, I can get an increasing offset but not at the positions we're after here. If you want to provide some additional info, I'm all ears.

[@johnny1b099]

@@CamInstructor OOPS. I didn't think about this thoroughly - your example is not a linear scaling problem. Sorry!

[@caseywaite599]

An easy way to do this for something like drilled holes or other canned cycles would be to program them in G91. Then you just copy paste X/Y.5156 for the number of instances - 1 for the first hole. This, however, is great for something outside of a canned cycle. Though, arguably could be done with subroutines as well. Anyway… a million ways to skin a cat.

[@CamInstructor]

That wouldn't quite work as the spacing is different for each hole, its moving 0.0156 more than the last move, not a consistent 0.0156 each time. You would have to change your incremental amount each time,. No real gain over absolute position as you cannot refer to the move you just made. The only solution on the control would be a macro program.

[@user-nn9ny8cq3s]

супер

[@brockfrancis4398]

Great content! Can you create a line from a csv import?

[@CamInstructor]

No. CSV for geometry will only create a point. There are ways you could use a csv file to create lines but this would involve either a script or a nethook.

[@user-ui4yx2kq1d]

Is Macros software part of cam software 🤔

[@avarillas75]

this is way too much work! why not use G91 instead? create a short subroutine and move incrementally, Done!

[@CamInstructor]

The spacing is changing between each hole. G91 will provide no advantage over G90.

[@Zekeneral]

ffs move to metric already :)

[@CamInstructor]

Or...just pretend these are really small metric parts :) I'll keep metric in mind for a future video 👍

[@ipadize]

americans already move to metric, inch by inch