Tool life management in CNC Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Tool Life Management in CNC Programming

📖 Scenario: You work in a CNC machining workshop. Each cutting tool has a limited life measured in minutes. To avoid tool breakage and poor quality, you want to track tool usage and alert when a tool needs replacement.

🎯 Goal: Create a simple CNC tool life management script that tracks the usage time of each tool, compares it to its maximum life, and lists tools that need replacement.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with tool names and their used time in minutes

Create a variable for the maximum allowed tool life in minutes

Use a loop to find tools that have used time greater than or equal to the maximum life

Print the list of tools that need replacement

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Tracking tool life helps prevent tool breakage, reduces downtime, and maintains product quality in CNC machining.

💼 Career

CNC operators and manufacturing engineers use tool life management scripts to automate maintenance schedules and improve workflow efficiency.

1

Create the tool usage data

Create a dictionary called tool_usage with these exact entries: 'ToolA': 120, 'ToolB': 80, 'ToolC': 150, 'ToolD': 60

CNC Programming

# Create the tool_usage dictionary with the given tools and their used time
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with keys as tool names and values as used time.

2

Set the maximum tool life

Create a variable called max_life and set it to 100 to represent the maximum allowed tool life in minutes

CNC Programming

tool_usage = {'ToolA': 120, 'ToolB': 80, 'ToolC': 150, 'ToolD': 60}
# Create max_life variable and set it to 100
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 100 to the variable max_life.

3

Find tools that need replacement

Create a list called tools_to_replace using a list comprehension that includes tool names from tool_usage where the used time is greater than or equal to max_life

CNC Programming

tool_usage = {'ToolA': 120, 'ToolB': 80, 'ToolC': 150, 'ToolD': 60}
max_life = 100
# Create tools_to_replace list with tools used >= max_life
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension with tool_usage.items() and check if used >= max_life.

4

Print the tools that need replacement

Write a print statement to display the list tools_to_replace exactly as: print(tools_to_replace)

CNC Programming

tool_usage = {'ToolA': 120, 'ToolB': 80, 'ToolC': 150, 'ToolD': 60}
max_life = 100
tools_to_replace = [tool for tool, used in tool_usage.items() if used >= max_life]
# Print the tools_to_replace list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(tools_to_replace) to show the list of tools needing replacement.