Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: home switches

« on: May 11, 2012, 12:29:42 PM »

I understand the ability to assign any of the five pins to any function, but I still don't have a way to assign a pin to "A" home without loosing something .   The way it runs now I can not Ref All Home, if I do the "X" axis and "A" motors head for home, the "X" trips home, stops, backs-up and slowly trips home again, the "A" motor keeps on going...and going.....till I hit the E-Stop

What do you do if you have a true 4 axis machine?  With 25 pins there must be some more usable pins, (I hope).....

2

General Mach Discussion / home switches

« on: May 10, 2012, 03:34:46 PM »

I wanted to set X axis home switch's.  I use two motors on the X axis "X" and "A".

My breakout board uses pin 12 for X home.  When I hit Ref home the X motor homes, back off, and slowly comes back and trips the X home but the A motor keeps going. 

OK, so I think, I'll just put a home switch on the "A" side of the X axis and wire it into the breakout board.

OPPS  There isn't an empty pin for "A" home switch.  This is how the break out board is wired.

  Limits     Y home     X home   Z home   E-stop
    P 10        P 11         P 12       P 13         P 15

So now what do I do?  After spending some bucks on nice roller switches and hours making ramps to trigger them and more hours drilling a tapping I'd really like to make this work...

3

General Mach Discussion / Wild "A" axis motor

« on: February 08, 2012, 04:54:14 PM »

This is just a standard 3 axis R&P router with two motors on the "X" axis the second is designated "A".

When I try to home all everything works until "X" homes. The "X" stops and resets off the home switch but the slave motor "A" doesn't see the home switch and keeps running. I tried telling it to see the same pins as "X" but it didn't.

Will restarting Mach 3 reset this??  Is there something I can do?

4

LazyCam (Beta) / Z negative will not post

« on: December 10, 2011, 05:12:41 PM »

Suddenly my Z will go to safe Z height then the X and Y will move to the first cut but the Z only goes to zero.  I looked a the g-code from lazycam and sure enough there is no Z negative posted.   I tried three times to convince lazycam that depth of cut is -0.275 and sent it to all layers but no luck.

It has always worked until today and I don't think I changed anything.   

Background:  Post DXF to lazy cam, autoclean, select tool, post to all layers.  Set cut depth, post to all layers.  Go to Mach3, load .tap file.  Look at the first few lines and no negative Z  shows up...only safe Z at 1 inch, then the move command then Z .000 f5 which should read Z-.275 f5.

I'm open to suggestions Thanks  Gumball

5

General Mach Discussion / Re: screwed up sign

« on: October 04, 2011, 07:19:24 PM »

For Rich and Dave:

Thanks for the suggestions,  LC is good enough to get me started.  I have made several small 8 inch by 12 inch signs and LC pocketed and did the islands perfectly.  This big sign used a different font and was much bigger, took two hours a 20 inches per minute....I,m going to try a different font and do it again.  great fun but a darn expensive and time consuming hobby...
Maybe Vcarve will have a sale this holiday season.. I'll wait and see...

6

General Mach Discussion / Re: screwed up sign

« on: October 04, 2011, 06:23:30 PM »

Thanks, hmmm, open vectors eh,  I suspected something like that. when the letters are blown-up from 270 pt to 6 inches the graphics program must forget to add pixels??

7

General Mach Discussion / Re: screwed up sign

« on: October 04, 2011, 10:52:32 AM »

This is the dxf file that produced the ugly sign, As I said the text font came out with snipes taken out and the program left 5 or 6 big holidays and a bunch of small ones.  The sign is 10 inches by 36 inches with a 1/4 cutter.

The dxf was produced in a graphics program (Serif) and exported to a usb flash drive.  The drive was then taken to my shop where I have LC and Mach3 on a stand alone computer to make the Gcode.... (no internet in the shop)  I think that I already deleted the Gcodes but I'll look if you want to see them.

After generating dxf I looked at the file in DraftSight (Desault) and it looked OK no orphans or broken lines.

I'm going to try again this morning  this time I'll run the file thru Draftsight to produce the final dxf. 

I guess I'll have to save up for V carve unless someone can suggest a more economical program for simple signs???

8

General Mach Discussion / screwed up sign

« on: October 03, 2011, 06:40:30 PM »

I designed a sign in Serif, a graphics program, and exported it as DXF to lazycam, looked OK so I set it up to cut from a 1x12 clear red wood plank.  Darn thing screwed up a couple of the letters and left a bunch of holidays behind.  Had to throw it away.  I even looked at the DXF file in DraftSight and it looked good, no extra lines or trash.  I have made smaller signs and it pocketed and left islands perfectly. This one was a big sign 12x36 and it's trash.

So it looks like I can't use Serif, at least with the fonts that come with it.

Question, where to get fonts that I can load into a CAD program like DraftSight and get a decent looking sign in 2D??

Or do I have to bit the bullet and buy V-Carve or something like it?

Shop made 48 x 48 inch CNC router...

9

LazyCam (Beta) / Re: Lazy cam setup

« on: August 04, 2011, 09:58:50 AM »

Thanks, that was what I expected to be able to do,  I think that I will just remove the four little holes cut all the parts then scroll saw the holes by hand,  after all it is just a puzzle made from 1/4 or 1/2 plywood. 

10

LazyCam (Beta) / Re: Lazy cam setup

« on: August 03, 2011, 03:40:34 PM »

I've reread the basics and tutorials, and .....
Here is what I am trying to do, the project is 25 parts cut out of plywood, two of the parts have inside cutouts.
I selected the inside chains and set the offset for inside, when I checked the outside chains they also changed to inside, so it looks like no matter what chain is selected the offset setting is global.

I tried setting up a new layer and sending the setting to the layer. ( it crashed three times because I didn't label  the layers or tried moving something that didn't work)  But if I understand LC correctly it will cut all the chains in a layer before it goes to the next layer so that will not work. So I gave up on setting up two layers.

I suspect that there is a simple solution to cutting a bunch of parts from a single sheet of material with inside and outside cuts. 

Any suggestions on where to find directions...