Changes to Fusion 360 Terms

Thank you for your kind replies everyone. I appreciate the helpful posts. I don't know what i will decide on yet.

Hi, I have been looking at Creo sketch. This looks like the kind of thing I am after. Has anyone used it for doing model engineering drawings? It looks like you can sketch with the mouse or a pen if the screen is touch sensitive.

As I went back to uni this year I tried this. I signed out, restarted F360, and it still has all the limitations. I use my Tormach once every few months so didn't notice anything until today when it refused to write out tool changes or do rapid moves.

There goes my 4th axis altogether and the RapidTurn with any reasonable speed of tool movement.

I guess I can manually edit the G code to try and work around the rapids.

Does it say "educational licence" at top left of screen, if not you are not running as an educational licence, You should be able to get rapids on educational and even the extensions are free.

No, it still says hobby license. I thought if I logged out and back in it might refresh, but no. So the website didn't complain when I applied and says I was upgraded but it doesn't seem to have stuck.

I'll check out that aircraft club offer and see if I can do that. I don't care if I lose all my current work in F360 if I can get a good deal on something else. All my jobs except a safety valve design are one-offs anyway.

I might pay $500AU for F360 if it was a one-off cost for hobby use, but I'm not paying that every year when I only use the machine a few times a year for one-offs.

I had a look at an open source add-in https://github.com/TimPaterson/Fusion360-Batch-Post and regarding the rapids it seems to do a post-post-process - ie loads and analyses the post processed g-code.

I decided to have a look at the Tormach milling post-processor and have added a simple patch to put at least some of the rapid Z moves back. It seems F360 milling toolpaths often start with a rapid X/Y move, followed by two rapid Z moves, then goes into the cutting. So if my patch sees a Z move that goes to above 0 (ie above the stock when the top of stock = 0) it emits a G0 rather than G1.

This restores rapids to the start and end of a toolpath, and also on the way up after a cutting pass when doing multiple depths.

This might not go well for you if you don't have +Z above your stock, or don't get toolpaths similar mine!

function onLinear(_x, _y, _z, feed) {
  // existing post-processor code
  var x = xOutput.format(_x);
  var y = yOutput.format(_y);
  var z = zOutput.format(_z);
  var f = feedOutput.format(feed);

  // use rapids for Z movement to Z > 0 and no X/Y
  if (_z > 0 && ! (x || y)) {
    writeBlock(gMotionModal.format(0), x, y, z, "(Assumed rapid)";
    feedOutput.reset();
    return;
  }

  // existing post-processor code
  if (x || y || z) {
    ...

Edited By David Taylor on 01/12/2020 03:53:26

Edited By David Taylor on 01/12/2020 03:54:00

For John Rutzen - you have a private message.