Back Tanned and Rested!

We’re just back from a family vaca in Cozumel, Mexico to go diving. If you like to scuba dive, Cozumel is one of the great destinations. We like it so much the whole family is certified and we’ve been going every year. This is our 8th trip since friends introduced us to the pleasures. I was definitely ready for it. My head was feeling pretty burned out after fighting my way through the basic foundations that had to be added to G-Wizard Editor to do lathe canned cycles. Now I’m back, batteries fully recharged, ready and raring to go.

Buenos dias, senor barracudas!

There are several near term priorities for us:

New Registration Server

For all products, we’re working on a new registration server. The one we have works, but many customers find it frustratingly slow. It is not uncommon to see some folks registering 3 or 4 times to try to kick it into action. Alas, it plods along at its own pace. You can count on it to do a batch of registrations at least once a day and usually twice. It can be pretty slow if you miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. I have the ability to manually goad it along, but I don’t always notice someone registering multiple times when I’m heads down coding.

The good news is it has made few mistakes and is pretty reliable. It’s third party software, and using it has allowed us to focus all our energy building functionality for machinists rather than on the nuts and bolts of things like registration servers. But, we’re reaching a stage where we’ve outgrown it. There’s enough activity in terms of new signups and new customers that the reg server is now slower than ever. Over 5000 machinists have tried G-Wizard, and nearly 1000 are on the GW Editor Beta test. It’s time for us to build our own and make it fast so new customers will have a better experience. It will take a couple of months to make it operational, but it’s already underway.

More G-Wizard Calculator Goodies

There’s a list of user requested features that are handy and should be added. I don’t want to spoil the fun too much, but we should have a GWC release early next week that has some of these goodies built in. We really appreciate all the wonderful input our users give for new features for G-Wizard Calculator!

G-Wizard Editor

Just as soon as I have the G71 canned cycle fully operational I’ll make another GWE release. I’m hoping that won’t be too long, but realistically, I suspect the GWC release next week will beat it out the door. After the first lathe canned cycle is out, the rest should follow pretty quickly. After the canned cycles are done, I will either look into more Fanuc macro compatibility (we have yet to do IF/THEN/WHILE, etc.), tool radius compensation, or tool geometry. It’s a toss up which one I’ll go after next, but I lean towards tool geometry, just because it will provide some good underpinnings for a lot of other features. Hopefully I will get a lot of feedback from users who try their G71 and other lathe programs as well. If you know someone that could benefit from G-Wizard G-Code Editor, please let them know to join the free beta test. Click here for the signup page.

Related posts:

1. I’m Back, Though Not 100%