When you are editing one of these two level button/leds how do you select the LED if you want to edit it? All I have found is to select the button, drag it out of place, then I can select the LEd. But then its messy to get the button re-aligned.

You cannot do this in Mach now. I have talked to Brian about making it possible in the new VB4 but he has not decided to do it yet.

All you can do is have some other button script read the DRO and make the adjustment.

The cut circle routine uses a circular lead in and lead out so you will see several moves besides the circle you want. The ramp in and out are properly handled if you ask for a groove the lead happens above the work- clearly it doesnt help with the cut, but it still makes a lead in.

In addition to the circular lead in there is a linear move to turn on the cutter comp.

As far as I know the circle routine works for all cases, Ive tested it a lot and i use it fairly often.

I have one I did for my emco lathe. It does the tool changer. Its not really finished but maybe it will be of interest.

I did it for a small touch screen so its only 640x800. It uses many of the screen buttons from the standard lathe screens

Id like to see a way get a VB Sub attached to each DRO that would be called when the DRO is changed by the user.

In almost every wizard screen the user can update a bunch of DRO's then finally pushes a'write code' button. Then I have to run through all the DROs to be sure they are valid and pop up error messages.

It would be much cleaner if when the user tried to change a DRO I could instantly error check it and popup an error then, while hes still looking at the DRO.

The VB code would not be run if the system changed the DRO value, or if some other VB code changed the DRO- only when a user enters a new value.

Have a look at the CopyCat wizard. With it you would lay your template on the table and manually jog the router around the path you want to follow, clicking on each corner or major feature. When its done the wizard generates a gcode program that will repeat that path.

There is a topic in this forum about CopyCat and its use. There is also a link to a nice doc on how to use it.

See http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,10437.0.html

Sorry, but you cannot drive a stepper directly from VB. As you have found there are all manner of unpredicatable time delays involved in VB and Windows.

What we speak of on this forum is not really VB- it is a scripting language based on VB, but it is hooked in to the Mach3 software. Mach3 can drive the steppers, this VB like language can issue commands to Mach to move the motors. So you can accomplish many things with this system that involve steppers, but its a bit more complicated that just hooking a stepper to a parallel port and running some VB.

Maybe tell us more of what you want to accomplish and we can offer some ideas.

The X and Y values entered into the wizard defines the center of the arc, not the starting point of the cut. t seems to me the wizard is doing the correct cut for a center and radius as you sepcified.

We have not settled on an exact plan, but I do not think we will do a full Mach seminar as last year. There will be at least a couple of 1 hr seminars, and I will be running a demo of some kind.

Note the CNC workshop that was held in Illinois has been re-created, and wlil be in Ann Arbor (outside Detroit) Michigan in June 2010. That will be a full week long event and Im sure there will be a lot of Mach sessions. Its all in early planning stages now

The cut spline uses a subroutine. The sub is saved in the subroutine folder, I think you are just looking at the main routine and only see the rotate moves, not the xy moves.