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General Mach Discussion / Re: Laser connection to Bitsensor control board.

« on: September 17, 2022, 01:49:07 AM »

I think you may be underestimating your ability – it would not be difficult for you to gate the two signals using an opto-coupler or an IC. You just need to do a bit of reading / research and be confident.

The BitSensor will work OK with an imaginary axis setup as long as you have two spare Output Pin# (one for the imaginary B Direction signal and one for the PWM signal).
As the Z axis is not used during laser working another alternative may be to use the Z axis Direction Pin#.

I believe that all the Mach3 external motion controllers made in the EU and the USA support the M11/M10 commands (none of the Chinese motion controllers do).
Although there are many different makes to choose from the Warp9 ESS may be a good choice.

Hope this helps.

Tweakie.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Laser connection to Bitsensor control board.

« on: September 11, 2022, 01:06:25 AM »

From the setup you have shown you would use Pin 11 as the laser On/Off switch. This becomes the Pin that would otherwise have been controlled by the M11/M10 commands.
To control laser power (by Spindle PWM) you would need to gate together the On/Off (Pin 11) and PWM signals.

This method is described in more detail in this thread;
https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=12444.msg265104#msg265104

Tweakie.

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Laser connection to Bitsensor control board.

« on: September 10, 2022, 10:18:34 AM »

The Bitsensor board does not support the M11/M10 command set.
The alternative method of laser switching (to avoid the burn marks associated with the M3/M5) is to use the direction pin of an imaginary axis.
For example set up the B axis then use B0 for laser OFF and B1 for laser ON.
Unlike the M3/M5 an axis command such as B0/B1 does not break the CV chain so there is no delay when laser switching.

Tweakie.

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General Mach Discussion / MOVED: Physical home switches with linear encoders

« on: August 15, 2022, 05:03:28 AM »

This topic has been moved to Mach4 General Discussion.

https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=46448.0

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General Mach Discussion / MOVED: Configuring limit switches

« on: August 15, 2022, 05:02:22 AM »

This topic has been moved to Mach4 General Discussion.

https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=46442.0

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VIDEOS / Re: How about this one?

« on: August 15, 2022, 05:00:25 AM »

Nice one Yoshii

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General Mach Discussion / Re: CNC work with robot arm?

« on: August 08, 2022, 02:43:24 PM »

As Craig has said, Mach does not support kinematics so you could not use conventional CAD/CAM software to program a robotic arms movement – however, many robot arms used in industry are programmed by the ‘teach’ method where the arm is jogged to the positions required (one at a time) and each position is saved as a string of movements.
Mach does support a ‘teach’ feature where each position jogged (by X,Y,Z,A,B,C axes) is saved as Gcode which can then be run (as a Gcode file) to exactly reproduce the movement of all positions previously taught. Obviously some planning is required during the ‘teach’ process to avoid collisions etc. as the arm would take the shortest route to the next position in the sequence when running the Gcode file.

Could be fun.

Tweakie.

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