Inventor Automation – Sending a Cut List to TigerStop

ED – This is a guest post on Inventor Automation is by Richard Gilmore of TigerStop LLC showing how to send automatically generated cutlists (parts lists) to a TigerStop (TigerFence, TigerCrossCut, Etc.) to speed production time and reduce errors. The cutlist shown here was generated by the model in the Shaker Table series of tutorials.

We use downloading software called Workflow Manager to sort the job files (normally by Width and Thickness) and then send the sorted jobs to TigerStop.  A Workflow Manager user would have to run a onetime file configuration on the .csv file to tell the software how to read it.  I will talk with my software folks to see if we can add Autodesk Inventor as a default profile in the software so the user doesn’t have to do the configuration step.  Next the user would go to the File menu and choose Open.  Once the user has chosen the Autodesk Inventor .csv file they will see this screen…

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Part List box on the left has all the parts in the .csv file sorted by the DESCRIPTION field.  If I were to right click in the Parts List box, the software would allow me to sort by any field in the .csv file.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We do this so the user can only download the parts they want to download.  For example, if the user only wanted to cut the “Legs” parts, they could just move the “Legs” over to the Selected parts box and the TigerStop software would only download the part data for the “Legs”.

 

 

 

Once the parts are selected, the user would press the OK button.  This would bring you to the main WorkFlow Manager grid. 

 

 

 

For the picture above, I have chosen to send all the parts in the file.  You can see at the bottom of the screen there are 3 tabs.  These tabs contain all the cuts separated by like Widths and Thicknesses.  We do this so we don’t send one list with multiple materials to the TigerStop.  TigerStop doesn’t know materials.  It only cares about Lengths and Quantities as far as downloading is concerned.  At this step, the user could edit the lists if they needed to.

Next we would press the Send button on the left of the main grid.  This would send the jobs to the Scheduler…

 

 

The Scheduler is where we assign jobs to the TigerStop or to multiple TigerStops using the Destination drop down.  We can add comments in the Comment field.  This comment will display for the operator when the list is downloaded.  The user can also enter a date into the Date due field.  This is mainly used for tracking so management can tell when a job is overdue or finished on time.  Once the jobs are released to their destination TigerStop, the TigerStop will periodically report back to the software and update the “Remaining Linear ft” and the “Yield” fields as the job is being processed.

By Richard Gilmore of TigerStop

That wraps up this Inventor Automation tutorial. If you need more info, please post your questions here so that Richard can answer it for everybody’s benefit..

 

You are here: OpenDesignProject | Inventor Tutorials | Automation | Inventor Automation – Sending a Cut List to TigerStop