Overview

Welcome to the Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant User's Guide. This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant Version 5 product.

This overview provides the following information:

Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant in a Nutshell

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Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant delivers Machinable Features recognition and associated functionalities for preparing a design part for Prismatic Machining.

This product assists the NC programmer in making the link between Design and Manufacturing. It provides a set of functionalities that generate all Prismatic Machinable Features of the design part. It builds a real Manufacturing View of the design part with all the drilling and milling features to be machined. Thanks to its Machinable Features Recognition technology, Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant allows Prismatic Machinable Features creation for all kinds of CATIA Version 5 design parts, including those with no Design Feature specifications, as well as non-CATIA Version 5 design parts.

It is totally integrated with the Prismatic Machining and Advanced Machining products. It dramatically reduces programming times by automatically creating all geometric areas that must be machined with Prismatic Machining operations, reducing time spent in geometry selections. 

All Machinable Features can be fully machined with Prismatic Machining strategies by creating elementary machining operations or applying more complex machining processes in both drilling and milling domains.

Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant offers the following main capabilities:

  • Automatically creates all Prismatic Machinable Features of a design part 
  • Locally creates a Prismatic Machining Feature of a design part 
  • Machinable Features integration in Prismatic Machining and Advanced Machining products
  • Management of Recognized Prismatic Machinable Features in Manufacturing View (presentation, edition, highlight, and so on). 

Before Reading this Guide

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Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

You may also like to read the following complementary product guides, for which the appropriate license is required:

  • Prismatic Machining User's Guide: explains how to machine prismatic parts.
  • NC Manufacturing Infrastructure User's Guide: explains how to use functionalities that are common to all Machining products.

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

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To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading and performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial. This tutorial will show you how to prepare a basic prismatic part for machining.

Then you should move on to the User Tasks section, which gives more complete information about the product's functionalities. The Reference section provides useful complementary information.

The Workbench Description section, which describes the commands that are specific to Prismatic Machining Preparation Assistant, will also certainly prove useful.

Accessing Sample Documents

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To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents contained in the doc/online/mpaug_C2/samples or doc/online/mpaug_D2/samples folder. For more information about this, refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.