Comparision of CAP and manual macro programming in actual manufacturing process

WANG Xiao-e， CHEN Zuo-yue
（Department of Mechanical Engineering， Leshan Vocational and Technical College， Leshan 614000， China）

Abstract： Aiming that the computer aided programming（CAP） is becoming increasingly popular，but the manual macro programming is gradually neglected during the CNC manufacturing process，the effects by applying these two programming methods into actual CNC manufacturing process were verified and compared. The differences of these two programming methods in principle were identified and the results of five types of programming communication way in the actual application were compared and evaluated. Through examples of the hemisphere milling and inside-hole helical milling processing，the process analysis and example verification were conducted and the concrete methods of CAD/CAM software optimizing the programming were discussed. Finally，the advantages and disadvantages of these two programming methods were concluded to find out the way which is most suitable for these two programming methods. The experimental results indicate that skillfully mastering the manual macro programming and flexibly applying it can help to compile the compact and accurate programming code，the manufacturing tolerance can even compete with that of the computer-aided programming．
Key words： computer aided programming（CAP）； CAD/CAM； manual macro programming； actual manufacturing process