Messages

2231

General Mach Discussion / Re: Pictures to GCode?

« on: March 06, 2016, 07:10:07 AM »

Again, nice work Hood (nice car as well).

PhotoVCarve is one of the softwares that I have never actually tried. Perhaps one day 

If it's of any interest, this was produced with DotG.

Tweakie.

2232

General Mach Discussion / Re: Pictures to GCode?

« on: March 06, 2016, 06:32:45 AM »

Nice work Hood.

Another couple of free software’s you guy's may find worth trying are…

Dxf2gcode (the post processor for this is easy to modify, if necessary)
https://code.google.com/hosting/moved?project=dxf2gcode

DotG  (my good friend Zoltan & I translated the manuals for this into English)
http://dotg.weebly.com/download.html

Tweakie.

2233

General Mach Discussion / Re: Artsoft sold??

« on: March 06, 2016, 05:25:26 AM »

Hi Benny,

It has indeed been a while, welcome back 

Tweakie.

2234

General Mach Discussion / Re: Controller Card blocks additional axis in Mach3

« on: March 06, 2016, 01:41:42 AM »

The problem is not related to Mach3, you need to contact the manufacturer of your controller to ask them why the step and direction signals for the B and C axes have not been made available.

Tweakie.

2235

General Mach Discussion / Re: Some starting advice for two steppers on one axis

« on: March 05, 2016, 08:01:50 AM »

My apologies to Sterling for following him around the forum but his diagram reminds me of Steel Nick’s excellent foam cutter design.

You just need to replace the hot-wire with a horizontal axis ??

Tweakie.

2236

General Mach Discussion / Re: Possible to send pulses directly to stepper driver while connected to a BOB

« on: March 05, 2016, 07:39:58 AM »

Just rambling…

It’s probably way OTT for your application but I had a similar situation a while back and after much experimentation and thought settled on a system of using two stepper motors driving one axis through a differential gear arrangement. One motor (controlled by Mach) did all the work of driving the axis and the other motor (controlled by a plc driven by sensors) made the corrections.

Just something to think about, perhaps ?

Tweakie.

2237

FAQs / Re: Wiring Limit, Home and E-Stop Switches

« on: March 05, 2016, 01:51:40 AM »

Typically...

C:/Mach3/xmlbackups

Tweakie.

2238

General Mach Discussion / Re: Spindle servo drive not working with mach 3

« on: March 04, 2016, 10:52:38 AM »

Is the spindle working OK now ?

Tweakie.

2239

General Mach Discussion / Re: Pictures to GCode?

« on: March 04, 2016, 08:56:04 AM »

Good fortune my friend 

Tweakie.

2240

General Mach Discussion / Re: New user

« on: March 04, 2016, 08:50:33 AM »

Come on Stew, you can’t learn it all from my website because I am not yet halfway through the learning process – I still have miles to go yet. 

I do appreciate that some may find that it is not easy to learn CNC and may struggle with it but nowadays they are in a very small minority. CAD/CAM software (such as Vectric) has moved on leaps and bounds in recent years and it is just so easy to design a part, create the Gcode, run Mach and produce the goods. We don’t necessarily need to know or understand exactly ‘how it works’ we just need to know exactly ‘how to use it’ (perhaps a bit like driving a car).
In an earlier post someone said ‘Hell if it was easy everyone would be doing it’ well guess what – looking at the numbers of new members to our forum who are starting out using Mach4, everybody is doing it. 

Tweakie.