WAM V1.7 has been released, which includes a few bug resolutions reported to our customer support team as well as a new cut cost estimator feature. 

Allowing Public Account Unit Measurement Changes

Public accounts can now change their units of measure. The entire options menu was previously disabled for public accounts.

Cut Cost Estimator

WAZER users at shared workspaces, job-shops, and prototyping departments within companies sometimes have the need to know exactly how much a cut will cost for internal accounting reasons. To aid in this quick calculation we now display the estimated cut cost of a file you are about to process based on your abrasive cost and other incurred machine run costs. 

To have this run as accurately as possible, make sure to visit your options menu once you log into WAM and check on two new fields you will see:

Abrasive Cost ($/lb): Enter a value that is representative of the cost of abrasive that you acquire it for. This will create more accurate “cut cost” estimates for you.

Other Machine Run Costs ($/hr): This is intended to take into account the costs of running your WAZER, outside of the abrasive cost, on an hourly basis. This will be used for the final “cut cost” estimates provided in the Cut menu. We suggest factoring in the Cut Bed, Nozzle, and long-term pump servicing costs to this value, which can be found on the WAZER consumables page. If you are a shop and also want to include hourly labor operating cost, this would be the place to do it! 

Improved Auto-pierce Functionality

An autopierce feature was built into WAM to have small holes, near the size of the WAZER kerf, not be attempted to be cut out as a path, but instead just have a pierce point created in that location. This was done to avoid the imperfections that result in attempting to cut holes less than 2.5mm in diameter. The autopierce functionality was re-written in this build to have a higher degree of predictability and consistency when it is initiated. 

So this fix is for customers that sometimes battled small features being missing or autopierce happening inconsistently upon processing their .gcode. Autopierce is enabled under the following two conditions as it is more accurate to just have a diameter the size of the waterjet stream be created than attempt to cut the tiny path:

• If centerline cut path is used, then the path will become a pierce point if the diameter of the path is less than 1.65mm 
• If inside or outside offset path is used, then the path will become a pierce point if the diameter of the path is less than (1.65mm + kerf).

As an example, let’s illustrate this behavior using the centerline cut path below.

Tiny light blue dots indicate auto-pierce points.

Password-reset Bug

WAM Password resetting was reported to not be functional under certain conditions. Going forward, all password resetting for WAM users can be done fully automated without the need of our Customer Support team needing to reset accounts.

Announcements Upon Log-in

If WAM receives new builds or there is important WAZER news, you will now get a prompt upon logging into WAM with the details to keep you in the loop.