CyclogramTwo downloads, both free, no account:
- cyclogram-template.xlsx — an Excel workbook. You type each movement's three parts and what it waits for; formulas give every start and end, the cycle time, and a chart of the bars in 0.1-second cells.
- bush-drilling.mcyc — the four-actuator drilling station from the case study, as a project file for the Cyclogram editor. Open it with File → 📂 Open and you have a finished chart to pull apart.
Both hold the same station, so the spreadsheet opens showing the 3.00-second cycle that the arithmetic article works out by hand, and you can check one against the other.
The Excel template
Sheet 1, "Cyclogram". One row per movement:
| Column | What you type |
|---|---|
| Actuator | The moving part: Clamp, Slide, Drill. One movement per actuator in this template. |
| Movement | A description, for the reader. |
| Waits for | The actuator whose movement this one cannot start before. Leave it empty for the movement that opens the cycle. |
| Until it has | arrived to wait for the end of that movement's stroke out, finished to wait for the end of its stroke back. |
| Offset s | Deliberate dead time after that event: valve response, a settle before a cut. Usually 0. |
| Stroke out, At the end position, Stroke back | The three parts of the movement, in seconds. |
The grey columns are computed: Start, Arrived (start + stroke out), Released (arrived + dwell), End (released + stroke back) and the movement's total. The cycle time is the largest End; next to it the sequential sum shows what the cycle would be with no overlap at all, so the difference is what the dependencies are worth.
Sheet 2, "Chart". The bars, drawn from those times. Each column is 0.1 s; a light cell is a stroke, a solid cell the time at the end position. Read down a column to see what the whole machine is doing at that instant. It is text, not graphics, so it survives any spreadsheet program and any e-mail.
Rows 2 to 31 carry the formulas already; fill in as many as you need and clear the example.
What the template cannot do
It is a spreadsheet, and honest about it:
- One predecessor per movement. A movement that waits for two things starts at the later of them; type that one.
- One movement per actuator. A gripper that closes twice in a cycle needs two rows and two names.
- No wrap. A movement that runs across the end of the cycle into the next one is not drawn.
- No collision check. Two movements that overlap where they physically must not look fine in the numbers. Look down the chart.
- No ramps. Strokes are flat cells, not slopes, so you cannot see where in a stroke a dependency should hang.
Cyclogram vs Excel goes through where each of these starts to hurt. The short version: the template is right for the first pass and for a station you will draw once; the editor is for the chart you will change.
The .mcyc sample
A .mcyc file is a Cyclogram project: plain JSON, readable in any text editor, holding the actuators, the movements with their three parts, the bindings between them and the project settings. Nothing in it is encrypted or tied to a machine; it is yours to keep, version and send.
To use the sample: open the editor, sign in with an e-mail address (free; the app then works offline too), File → 📂 Open, pick the file. The free edition opens and shows any project; editing a project larger than two actuators and six tasks takes a Full licence — every new account has one free for its first month. Drag a bar, and watch the dashed bindings re-time everything downstream, which is the one thing no spreadsheet can do.
To make your own template instead: draw the actuators you always have, save it with File → 📄 Save as…, and open that file at the start of every new station. Or save the pieces to the 📚 Library, in folders, and drag them onto a new project one at a time.
Reusing or sharing the files
Both files may be copied, changed and passed on freely, inside and outside your company, with or without attribution. The spreadsheet was generated by a small script in the Cyclogram repository (scripts/make-cyclogram-template.mjs), so a corrected or extended version is a short change away; tell [email protected] what you would like it to do.