Well onto the bit you will need more than anything, Programs and how to write them / use them. You may wonder why nothing has gone up yet about setting these machines up to run but to be fair, there are a lot of bits you need to know first before trying that and having a functional program is the most important. Bad programming is one of the biggest causes of a machine bang, in fact, it’s probably responsible for more crunches than all the other reasons added together.
I’m sure there will be people who want to argue this bit but remember, if you can already code then why are you here anyways? This is to help people that have no real idea and want somewhere to start, not to teach time served folks a new way to suck eggs.
While I’m ranting…EZ Program, Graphical interface programming, I-Guide programming, interactive programming…Oh please..Unless it’s a Mazak what the hell are you doing? All the on-machine GUI programming interfaces are what is killing this industry (I’m too near retirement to care much) it enables employers to take on underqualified staff and get them to run machines they have very little clue about and pay the least they can get away with.
Most Fanucs have an “Active Command” display or similar on the screen that tells you the commands in use, If that reads G90, G21,G01 etc and you have no idea what they actually mean then you are not the driver, you are a passenger hoping not to crash and really have no place playing with kit that can kill you. It’s really not that difficult and most G-Codes (and M – codes) are universal across a lot of machines. If there is a mistake in your program how are you going to spot it?
So this bit will be quite long and have a LOT of sub-menus so you can refer back and see exactly what any given code or code block is doing (or should be doing).