I'm making acoustical wall panels, which involves drilling a bunch of holes into a 4 x 8 panel: 8mm through-holes spaced 16mm apart, a total of 6880 holes per sheet. My machine has a 7 position drill block that I've loaded up with 8mm bits. WoodWOP has a Block function where you can easily create an array of holes. In my case, WoodWOP creates a nice tiny 2kb MPR file with all 6880 holes, but when I load the MPR file into my 2016 vintage CNC console, the console freezes, goes out to lunch and never comes back. Windows' resource monitor shows all 4 CPU cores redlined but hardly any RAM usage. It does not recover after waiting 30 minutes.
During troubleshooting, I discovered that shrinking the array to half the quantity of holes will work: the console chews on the file for 2 minutes, eventually digests it, and allows me to run it. Turning off WoodWOP's drill optimization (pattern recognition that matches holes with my drill block configuration) does work...I can nest the whole array, but it will only use one drill bit at any given time. Stiles techs haven't yet come up with an answer on why it chokes. To them, I'm not asking the CNC to do anything beyond its capacity but they don't know why it misbehaves. On a whim, I created the same array of holes in Cabinet Vision 2022, which predictably failed. Drawing in Autocad and importing the DXF into WoodWOP resulted in console freeze also. The problem doesn't appear to be linked with how I draw the array, but rather how my CNC console is doing pattern recognition on the MPR file. I don't know how to troubleshoot it further.
I don't mind hacking together 2 separate programs to get my full array, as long as I can get them to run sequentially without physically pressing the start button to activate the 2nd, as it's not production-friendly. That's my question: anyone running a Homag / Weeke CNC know of a way to run 2 programs sequentially in Production Mode without having to push the start button in between?