THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PROFILE-MILLING PROGRAM FOR TEACHING COMPUTER-AIDED-MANUFACTURING AND CNC PROGRAMMING

摘要

At SUNY College at Buffalo, a new course, TEC302,CAD/CAM, computer-aided-design and computer-aidedmanufacturingwas added to the Industrial Technology (IT)undergraduate curriculum in the fall of 1994. At that time, thetechnology department had been using the AutoCAD system fordesign/drafting, and SmartCAM for demonstrating computeraided-manufacturing.SmartCAM is a sophisticated product that takes a greatdeal of training to use, does not work directly in AutoCAD, andwith only four licenses, was not available to all the students.For these reasons, the author developed a CAM program,VAL-CAM, that works inside AutoCAD, and has most of theaspects of a more sophisticated CAM program, yet is simpler touse, is available to all students, and automatically generatesCNC (computer-numerical-control) code suitable for driving thedepartments' vertical milling machining center.This paper discusses the development of VAL-CAM, whichis written in the AutoLISP language for compatibility withAutoCAD. The dialogue control language (DCL) of AutoCADwas also used for part of the user interface for VALCAM. Thealgorithms, flow diagrams, pseudo code and actual LISP codefor some of the more interesting parts of the program arepresented. VAL-CAM is under continuous development, andlater sections of the program will be discussed in future papers.