I Let AI Program My CNC… It Beat Me

AI is everywhere these days and your CNC programming department should be no different. What I'm about to show you guys is CamAssist by CloudNC and I'm going to show you exactly how this software can transform the way your machine shop does business. Now we're not going to blow any smoke, I'm going to show you guys the good and the bad and then we're going to bring that program over here and run it on this bad boy right here, the Sile X5. Today I'm going to be programming this part here on my screen using CamAssist by CloudNC. All right, so now that we have CamAssist all set up and ready to go, we're ready to hit go to prepare. Now I'm going to click on our stopwatch here and let's see how long it takes to go from nothing to finished toolpaths. Start the timer, go to prepare, run CamAssist and send the cam package. There you go, it took about 35 seconds and we got 21 toolpaths out of it. Now that's incredibly fast, it would have taken me at least 30 minutes to get all these toolpaths done and defined and get all the geometry created. But you see in just a matter of seconds, we have a program that's nearly complete. Now if you're a shop that has hundreds of programs in your backlog, this is going to save you a ton of time. So now that we have these toolpaths generated by CamAssist, we're going to go in and just make some slight adjustments. Even in that little pocket, we're still hitting 390 inches a minute. So right away, the thing I don't like about this toolpath is it's taking shallow depth cuts almost like you would with a high feed mill. In this case, I'm going to change that toolpath to use the full depth of the cutter and take a light step over. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep this initial toolpath constrained to inside of the part. Then at the end, I'm going to come out and do a dynamic milling around the outside and then finish using a ramp strategy. So we're going to go back into the geometry of that toolpath and under toolpath control, we're going to select this as our containment boundary. So one thing I don't like about this toolpath is the lead-in and lead-out. Even though they probably work just fine, I kind of want to enter outside of the part and then come in. So we're going to go into our lead-in and lead-out and make that 0.4. And there, since the whole pocket's already roughed out, the tool's going to plunge straight into open space and then finish the top of our part. So now it starts going and doing the finishing work. So it's going to finish up to the top of these towers and just finish the walls. And you can look here and see that it gave us three different operation folders. One for roughing, one for finishing the flat geometry, and one for finishing the wall geometry. All right, then it finishes the wall in the next two stages. Right now, it's finishing just the backside of this island, but I also want it to finish the side. So I'm going to go in and select new geometry for that. And I want to make sure we're giving it a good long tangent lead-in and lead-out. All right, then it finishes the wall over here. I also want it to finish the wall of this ramp here. So I'm going to reselect geometry for that. Finishing the walls in the bottom pocket, finishing the outside profile of the island. Now, a really cool new feature in CamAssist is the strategy editor. After CamAssist goes through and decides the operations that it's going to want to use to make this part, you can go in as the programmer and you can edit things like the tool assembly that's being used. You can enable and disable operations, change speeds and speeds. Whatever it is you want to change, you can change up front before CamAssist outputs the tool paths to Mastercam. Now, the amount of stock we're going to leave on our walls is kind of important. I don't want to take it to where it's only 5,000 from finished because with how tall this wall is compared to its width, we're going to get a whole lot of chatter. So I want to make sure I leave, let's say, 100,000 on that wall and nothing on the floor. Our stepover will once again be 6%. Our back feed rate will be 390. And that looks good to me. We're going to tell it to go only three quarters of an inch deep, which is half of that wall's height. And that's a wrap. So you can see in just a matter of a couple of minutes, I was able to get this part fully programmed, at least the first operation. And this would have taken me at least four times as long had I needed to create each of these tool paths and all the geometry from scratch. Now you can imagine if this part was a lot more complex, this would save you a lot of time. But this part here, we only had 25 tool paths. But if you figure each one of those takes you maybe two or three minutes, that's going to be a big time saver. If you're in the market for a small machine like this with big capabilities, visit our website at titanzascnc.com. We have over a dozen of these in stock right now. It's a great time to buy. And trust me, you won't be disappointed. Guys, there are only a few days left for early bird pricing on Boombastic 2026 tickets. So make sure you go get yours now. The link will be in the description below. And this year, we are doing it even bigger than last year. There's going to be another VIP event on the Wednesday evening and then a two-day open house on Thursday and Friday. Not only that, but we are running skill sprints this year, which are hands-on training led by our amazing partners that will be sponsoring the show. So if you want to be here with us in November, make sure to get your tickets below now.