Hi,
not quite sure what you mean, as far as I'm aware Mach4 is meant to be Fanuc 21i compliant and all the Gcodes etc are available
in Mach4Hobby. If you want Macro B that is restricted to Mach4Industrial.
As I posted earlier Mach, both 3 and 4 focussed on milling ops. There is some lathe specific stuff, and that body of code and
features is growing but still Mach4 is best at milling rather than lathe ops.
also, the "turn cycles" are quite a joke. and you cant post process it to generate some example code.
The turn cycles are not actually NFS property, they are donated by another company, Mach Motion. Therefore your access to its internal workings
are rather limited. None-the-less you can chain operations together for some pleasing code.
Mach4 is not primarily a 'conversational programmed' machine. It has always been assumed that you would either hand write code or
more likely use CAD/CAM/Post route.
i couldnt find any information about C axis indexing or polar milling.
There is a dearth of info about that, but it can be done. There are three 'modes' that apply to a spindle:
1) Normal mode, that is free running, without indexing or positional control. In Mach4 the spindle is one specific Out-of-Band axis,
and it has a number of API features that make it amenable to general use. May I suggest looking at the Spindle section of the API.chm
Help file.
2)Assign the spindle to an Out-of-Band axis, other than the spindle. Therefafter you can jog the spindle with all the usual means but in addition
you can jog under program control. Thus you can have an independent axis capable of indexing. I refer you to the Jogging section of API.chm Help file.
3) Assign the spindle as a genuine C axis and thereafter you have complete control of position and velocity and is coordinated with
the other axes.
I can and do use all three modes on my mill spindle. Free running mode is by far the easiest and most commonly used. I use C axis mode
(coordinated) for rigid tapping. I can swap between modes programmatically.
Given that you are looking for lathe control particularly then maybe Mach is not the best choice. To my knowledge however none of the
Windows based PC software solutions have particularly good lathe features. For example UCCNC software is a direct competitor to Mach4
but it too is mill-centric, and again only to the best of my knowledge, is even less capable than Mach at lathe ops.
You might be advised to look at Centroid Acorn, it is mill-centric but I have no first hand knowledge of how it handles lathe ops.
LinuxCNC is a widely capable software and being open source has a lot to recommend it. I've heard little discussion about how it handle lathe ops
but given its wide following would suspect that lathe ops are well covered.
Craig
Guest
Show Posts