Fixture
The fixture is what clamps the workpiece onto the machine table. Setting one up is three things: having a fixture on the project at all, giving it a geometry, and placing that geometry between the table and the workpiece.
Where it is
The General Setup page, at /general-setup, reached from the menu bar's Page dropdown. Select
the Fixture branch of the Control Tree (/general-setup?tree=equipment/fixture); it sits with
the other equipment items, between Coolant and Workpiece. The selected node's editor opens below the
tree in the same dock, and the canvas beside them draws the fixture with the rest of the scene.
The branch root selected on a demo project, at /general-setup?tree=equipment/fixture. The panel
under the tree is a summary rather than an editor: the Object Management (⋮) button, a
Geometry type badge naming the kind in the slot — here TransformationGeom — and the caption
saying that the geometry and the two anchor transformers are edited through the child items. Both
of those children, Geometry and Anchor, carry expand arrows of their own.
The fixture a project carries
A new project is created with a fixture already on it, its geometry slot pre-filled with a
TransformationGeom, so the branch is normally populated the moment a project is open. A project
may also legitimately carry no fixture: the root then has no children under it, the Object
Management button is greyed out, and the caption reads No fixture available. Open or create a
project first. That is a valid setup rather than a broken one — with no fixture the workpiece is
assembled onto the machine directly, anchored on its table buckle, one of the four named anchors the
scene is assembled at (Assembly Anchors); the two transforms below
then play no part.
The root panel's Object Management button is the fixture's file surface, available only once the
project has a fixture. Load installs a .Fixture or .xml file picked from the server in
place of the current one — re-attaching the table and workpiece buckles, rebuilding the branch and
confirming with a Fixture replaced notice. Save As writes the current fixture out, offered as
Fixture.xml in the project directory; Copy / Paste carry it as XML; XML Mode edits
that XML directly, its Apply installing the result exactly as a Load does.
Giving it a geometry
Select Geometry (equipment/fixture/geometry). Its own panel is the kind picker alone, labelled
Geometry type, with None (unset) to clear the slot; the picked kind's editor opens as the
node beneath it, and the root panel badges whichever kind is in the slot. A fixture geometry must be
able to produce an STL, so the voxel meshed-geometry kind offered on the Workpiece branch is absent.
| Kind | Pick it for |
|---|---|
Box3d |
A plate, a block, a vice body — anything box-shaped. |
Cylindroid |
A solid of revolution given as Z–R pairs: a round chuck, a spacer. |
StlFile |
A mesh exported from CAD, for a fixture worth drawing accurately. |
TransformationGeom |
Another geometry with a transform in front of it — what a new project starts with. |
GeomCombination |
Several of the above assembled into one fixture. |
Placing it
Two transform nodes hang from the branch's Anchor group, each a kind picker labelled Transformer type over the picked kind's editor.
| Node | What it sets |
|---|---|
Geom To Workpiece (equipment/fixture/geom-to-workpiece) |
Where the workpiece attaches — the workpiece buckle — relative to the fixture geometry. |
Geom To Table (equipment/fixture/geom-to-table) |
Pins the fixture geometry onto the machine's table buckle. |
What an anchor is, and the order to fill these in, are Anchor. To check the result, the Scene dropdown in the toolbar above the canvas carries Fixture Rendering Mode and the Fixture Geometry Anchor, Workpiece Buckle and Table Buckle overlays.
See Also
- Anchor — what the two transform nodes above are for, and the order to place them in
- Workpiece — the part this fixture holds, and its own geometry and material
- Machine Tool — the chain carrying the table buckle the fixture is pinned to
- Program Zero Alignment — the task that moves this fixture's Geom To Table transform when the part has to be placed on a recorded work offset
- Setup — the rest of the pre-simulation configuration