Messages

1941

General Mach Discussion / Re: Continuation after tool change

« on: December 07, 2007, 08:50:47 AM »

Hey dunkers - thanks for this - you've nearly sent me crazy  I KNOW you're right because I used this feature without giving it a second thought. Now - as you say it's gone - (Been doing single tool jobs longer than I realized because I didn't notice it's passing till I saw your post). In fact I've just reloaded ALL the prrevious versions of Mach3 I have on file (back to 1.83 but missing some) and can't get it to repeat this feature. Maybe we're just imagining it - NOT  . - Difficult to know how we ever managed to do a toolchange without it.

Until our collective sanity returns you can use the "Remember/Return" buttons and do it manually. Alternatively you can add a degree of automation (nearly back to what used to be) by adding doOEMButton(286) (the remember button) to M6Start and doOEMButton(285) (the return button) to M6End. Slightly annoyingly it'll pop up the "Return" button dialog but that's about the best alternative I can find at the moment.

1942

General Mach Discussion / Re: edge finding/2.5D probing

« on: December 07, 2007, 06:28:08 AM »

All may not be lost yet. From what I can tell your interest is in the 3D probing rather than 2.5D and you'd just (ideally) use the 2.5D to produce the boundary for the 3D probing routine - is that correct?

If so, then you don't HAVE to use the 2.5D routine to create the boundary. You can create that by any number of means, even by hand and feed it into the 3D routine. Check out the attached image and you'll see what I mean. This shows a table with the object (the rough star shape) to be (3D) probed overlapping the table. The small circles show the points (at some arbitrary stepover) that need to be probed and of course the small crosses represent wasted probing in standard routines. The arrows show the points that you could enter into the triplet file by hand, in this case 17 of them. Depending on your amount of "waste" space and the complexity of your object you may find it worthwhile to try this approach. Remember your boundary profile doesn't have to be hugely accurate to cut down dramatically on the waste probing. This example has a saving of nearly 40% over standard routines (crosses / (crosses + circles) * 100)

1943

General Mach Discussion / Re: edge finding/2.5D probing

« on: December 06, 2007, 04:08:43 PM »

That, as they say, is a very good question. I'm intrigued as to what you have in mind. Maybe you have a feature for the ? ? ? tab.

The answers: Currently my 2.5D probing routine will not cope with not being able to go all around the object. Why? because it wasn't designed to do that and it will hit limits, soft hard or physical.

Re: the efficiency of my 3D routine: The less rectangular the object, the more efficient it is over a "standard" bed o nails routine. I'm thinking there's probably a nice mathematical equation for calculating the actual efficiency and it might be based on something like this: Calculate the area of the rectangular bounding box of the object. Calculate the actual area of the object. Divide the former by the latter giving a measure of efficiency. Obviously the more real estate that is NOT probed by mine but that IS probed by the standard, then the more efficient mine is.

Hope this helps.

Ian

1944

General Mach Discussion / Re: new user - help...Homeing

« on: December 06, 2007, 12:11:26 PM »

I don't think these machines have limit or home switches (may of course be wrong) so I suspect you've messed with ports n pins/inputs and made the system think it has home switches and that at least one is active. The message is what you get if you try to home and a home switch is stuck active. That said don't Romaxx give you an XML file? you could just copy that off your CD and all should be as when you started.

1945

General Mach Discussion / Re: Z axis Jogging when MACH is running :)

« on: December 06, 2007, 11:55:37 AM »

Hi Carlo - not exactly sure what it is you're wanting but it puts me in mind of THC in plasma - any use?

1946

General Mach Discussion / Re: Uploading g codes

« on: December 06, 2007, 11:50:47 AM »

Hi Luis - I'll take a flyer at this one. As you're set up in mm I suspect that your machine is working just fine but the roadrunner is TINY - about 6mm accross. Also the feedrate is 60mm / min so very slooooooow. It's meant (I guess) to be in imperial units. Insert a G20 at the beginning and I think it'll rock and roll.

1947

General Mach Discussion / Re: edge finding/2.5D probing

« on: December 06, 2007, 11:35:42 AM »

By the by, stirling, can the object being probed be bigger than the X&Y travel of my machine?

Not sure I'm with you there looker1, can you expand a little?

1948

General Mach Discussion / Re: edge finding/2.5D probing

« on: December 06, 2007, 04:37:16 AM »

OK - you're nearly there. The little square dance is what it does when it loses the edge. (In the future this will/may form the basis of a "re-find lost edge" routine). Ignore the G31Fix error - I have no idea why M5 should raise this as an error - but it doesn't matter.
It loses the edge more often than not (but not exclusively) because "backoff" is set too high. If you have it set at the default (75%) then try dropping it to 50%. Also obviously I don't know what you have set stepover to be, but until you get it all working I'd recommend setting stepover to no less than approx 1/4inch (6mm) - the smaller the stepover - the more sensitive all the settings become - around 5 to 6mm is a good place to start untill you get the hang.

1949

General Mach Discussion / Re: edge finding/2.5D probing

« on: December 03, 2007, 12:53:11 PM »

Cheers Mike  - how's things going with you? - done any probing yet?

Hey Terry - how about you?

1950

General Mach Discussion / Re: why is mach suddenly doing this?

« on: December 03, 2007, 08:50:50 AM »

Hi FastFieros - thanks for your response.

I think I've discovered what the problem is. As an Englishman I have my default units set to... erm, well metric of course!!!!. My RhinoCAM POST also puts a G21 in the prolog of my tap files so I'm definitely in metric (mm). What seems to have happened is that Mach at some point decided to reset my native units to imperial - sorry, English  . After resetting the native units back as they were - i.e. to mm - all seems well and accurate again.