Messages

1

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: The machine can jog around, but nothing happens from MDI or GCode

« on: April 08, 2021, 03:16:38 AM »

I figured it out! I didnt realize the message bar at the bottom of the screen held the answers for me the entire time! I had previously played around with an Inhibit motion pin, and forgot to turn it off. I did not know that you can still jog around with the inhibit motion active.

2

Mach4 General Discussion / The machine can jog around, but nothing happens from MDI or GCode

« on: April 08, 2021, 01:41:52 AM »

Hello All,

I am quite a big newb with Mach4, this is my first time using it, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on. We have built a custom rotary plasma cutter controlled through Mach4 and an Ethernet SmoothStepper.

I can jog the machine around using the buttons from within Mach4, and the machine also responds/moves to its home position after clicking on "reference all axis". I cannot however get it to respond to MDI commands or run through G-code files. Even a simple G0 X1 command in the MDI results in no movement.

When I click 'Cycle Start MDI', the line number jumps to 1, and the cycle time starts counting up, but the machine does not move, and the position numbers do not change. The cycle time counts up forever, and nothing happens.

I'd like to reiterate that we are complete newbs, so thank you very much in advance!

3

General Mach Discussion / Changing current position mid program in Mach4

« on: April 01, 2021, 07:56:43 PM »

Hello All,

I am a complete newb with Mach4, but I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. We are building a rotary plasma cutter, and we want to be able to cut tubes that are longer than the machine.

There are a couple ways this could be accomplished, but I was wondering if it would be possible to move the tube a known amount (tracked with a rotary encoder) and then change what the 'current position' is in mach4 during a pause state between cuts?

Doing this by hand isnt the end of the world, but do you know if it would also be possible to feed the rotary encoder output into Mach4 for this displacement to be updated automatically?

Cheers,
Nathaniel

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General Mach Discussion / Custom Subroutines? - University Capstone Project - Complete Newbies

« on: March 29, 2021, 07:12:02 PM »

Hello all,

I am working with a small group of university students on a custom CNC rotary plasma tube notcher. The intent is to cut and scribe the tubes used for our Baja SAE chassis. We have very little CNC experience, so we are complete newbies to Mach4, so please excuse our ignorance! Our machine runs on an Ethernet Smoothstepper, and we are using SheetCAM with the rotary plasma plugin, and of course are using Mach4 Hobby to control things if it matters.

Onto the inquiry! Our machine has a tube workspace of ~20" that is long enough to cut most of our tubes, but what we'd really like to do is cut arbitrarily long tubes by doing the following:

1. First end of the tube is cut
2. The tube is manually pushed through the machine, with a rotary encoder tracking the displacement
3. The machine then cuts the second end of the tube.

We are not 100% sure about how to accomplish this, and because we are newbies, we are not sure about what tools and limitations that Mach4 has for us at our disposal. Is it possible to write custom g-code subroutines? i.e. in the SheetCAM post processor, if the tube needs to be manually repositioned gXX is called which Mach4 interprets as a subroutine for us to move the tube a certain amount, and then the new position is updated automatically through the rotary encoder? Is something like that possible?

If someone would be willing to point us in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated! We are not asking for anybody to do any grunt work for us, but just to maybe offer a bit of handholding to get us going.

Thanks so much in advance!