creating your own posts

In the Help menu there is an entry called Posts. This item contains information that will help those wishing to modify or write their own post processors.

This includes details on new Post Processing functionality in the Wire-EDM module including:

Simpler commands to format the output, thereby enabling easy switching between inch/metric and absolute/incremental output.

Current single-line IF command enhanced to include IF/THEN blocks and IF/ELSE.

The ability to output part profile data (rather than toolpath data) as required by machines such as the Agie Evolution.

A flag in posts to indicate if part is upside-down.

New post variables for Part name, Part Filename, Tape name and variables for the new datum functionality.

About creating your own posts

The default EDM posts are installed in the \plugins\edm\posts folder. You will find the plug-ins folder in the same location as your Gibbs EXE file. Each EDM post is a single text file with the extension ".pp". Also the posts folder there should also be a similarly named file with the extension ".cfg". this file is used by the EDM product and contains machine configuration settings such as travel limits and technology field names. This file must not be edited.

When EDM runs, it looks in the \plugins\edm\posts folder and builds a list of all ".pp" files. This list is displayed, alphabetically, as the list of machines on the wire strategy form.

Before making changes to any post, be sure to always make a backup copy of the post. If this backup is made within the \plugins\edm\posts folder and has the ".pp" extension it will also appear on the machine list.


!	If you copy a post to a new name, you should also copy the associated ".cfg" file. When EDM runs, it will create a ".cfg" file for post if one does not already exist, but it will use default values for the technology configuration settings which may be different from those used by the post that you have copied.

Each post is test file that can be edited using a standard text editor. If a word-processor type editor is used, make sure to save the post as a text file. The post file is not case dependant, although lower-case is generally used.

Comments may be included by preceding the comment with an exclamation mark (!). Comments can either be added to the end of a line or a complete line may be a comment. Where a numeric value is to be used, an expression may be used. Your own variables may be also be created to help with calculations. Variable names may be up to 32 characters. Variable names must start with a character (A-Z), can contain the underscore character ("_") and numbers (0-9).

To avoid conflicts, use names that are not likely to be used in future versions of the software when defining variable names. This can be done by adding a user-specific prefix. For example, instead of "offset1", use "post1_offset1".

Valid Variable Definitions

All variables are treated as floating point numbers. There are several text variables that may be used to create output. You cannot create your own text variables and there are currently no text manipulation functions.