Weeke machining centres
Weeke is a Homag Group brand of CNC machining centres, known in particular for boring and routing work. Its machines are programmed in woodWOP and load the same .mpr files as the rest of the group.
- Type
- Machine builder
- Based in
- Germany
- Part of
- Homag Group
- Programmed with
- woodWOP
- Machine control
- powerControl, powerTouch
- File formats
- .mpr
What a drilling program looks like in MPR
A drilling program is a sequence of blocks, one per operation, each naming the macro that performs it and then the values that macro needs. A vertical hole and a hole into an edge are different macros rather than the same macro with a flag, which makes a drilling program easy to read once you know what you are looking at: you can count the holes by counting the blocks. Positions are given in the panel frame set up by the header, to the thousandth of a millimetre.
The depth trap: drilling and contours are not measured the same way
This is the single most useful thing to know about the format, and it catches almost everyone once. A drilling depth is measured down into the material from the face being worked, exactly as you would expect. A contour depth is not. It is written as the height of material left standing beneath the cut, measured up from the underside of the panel. So a 6 mm deep groove in an 18 mm panel is written as 12, and a cut right through is written as 0. Two conventions, one file, and no warning from the format itself.
Edges are named by direction, not numbered
A hole going into the side of a panel has to say which side. woodWOP names each edge by the axis it lies along and which end of that axis it is, rather than giving the faces numbers the way an SCM program does with its side selector. A conversion therefore has to map one scheme onto the other, and a face mapped wrongly does not produce an obviously broken file: it produces a valid program that drills into the wrong edge. netool marks its horizontal drilling output unverified for exactly this reason.
Why so many Weeke programs look nearly identical
Because they are meant to. The variables block lets the panel dimensions be named rather than fixed, so one program can cover a family of parts that differ only in size. A shop that has been running these machines for years usually has a library of parameterised programs rather than one file per part. A program converted from a format that has no variables will come across as fixed numbers instead, which is correct for the part it was converted from and less useful afterwards.
Bringing a program over from an SCM machine
netool reads Xilog Plus XXL and Morbidelli PGM and writes MPR, remapping the faces, rebuilding the arcs by radius and inverting the contour depth. Be clear about the status: the MPR writer follows the published description of the format, and no file it has written has yet been opened in woodWOP or run on a machine. Every conversion reports that, and the 56 reason codes name anything else it declined to translate. Open the result in woodWOP and look at it before you cut with it.
File formats on this site
.mprwoodWOP MPR
Converters for these formats
XXL to MPR converter
Turn a Xilog Plus XXL program into a woodWOP .mpr program for Homag, Weeke and Brandt machines.
Open toolPGM to MPR converter
Turn a compiled Morbidelli PGM program into a woodWOP .mpr program for Homag, Weeke and Brandt machines.
Open toolMPR to XXL converter
Turn a woodWOP .mpr program into a Xilog Plus XXL program for SCM and Morbidelli machines.
Open toolMPR to PGM converter
Turn a woodWOP .mpr program into a compiled Morbidelli PGM program for SCM and Morbidelli machines.
Open toolMPR to G-code converter
Turn a woodWOP MPR program into plain ISO G-code for routers that take it.
Open toolRelated entries
Common questions
What file format do Weeke machines use?
The same as the rest of the Homag Group: woodWOP .mpr files, plain text, with a header, a block of named panel dimensions and one block per operation. There is no separate Weeke format.
Why is my converted depth wrong?
Almost always the contour convention. woodWOP writes a contour depth as the material left standing under the cut rather than the depth of the cut, so 12 in an 18 mm panel means a 6 mm deep cut and 0 means right through. Drilling depths are written the normal way round, which is what makes the mix so easy to misread.
How does woodWOP say which edge a hole goes into?
By naming the edge after the axis it lies along and which end of that axis it is, rather than by numbering the faces. That is a different scheme from the side selector in an SCM program, and mapping between the two is one of the steps a conversion has to get right.
Can netool convert a drilling program to MPR?
It writes drilling operations into the MPR it produces, and it reports the support level of each. Horizontal drilling in particular is marked unverified, because the edge naming has not been confirmed by opening a converted side-drilled program in woodWOP. Anything netool cannot encode honestly is refused rather than approximated.
Is netool affiliated with Weeke or Homag?
No. netool is an independent converter. Weeke, Homag, Brandt and woodWOP are trademarks of their owner and are named here only to describe the file formats netool reads and writes.