Messages

331

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / CNC Pipe Bender

« on: January 10, 2009, 05:11:33 AM »

Recently finished a pipe bending machine's control. See it in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFkmAgNX1Hg . Used AC servo motors for pipe feed and rotation axes, encoder feedback for the bending axis and stepper driven positioning of the bending angle setup switch. Designed the screens with Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9 and Screen4.

Zafar

332

Works in progress / Re: Greek Concept on mach3 user interface!

« on: January 10, 2009, 12:40:09 AM »

George,

It's the most eye catching design so far in my opinion. Neat and crisp are two words best describing it. I would love to build on it our next mach3 screen set. It would be a service to us all if you could finish the other screens too. I am willing to convert these to mach screen sets as these are exactly to my taste.

Zafar

333

General Mach Discussion / jogging with multimedia keyboard's volume control knob

« on: January 05, 2009, 01:23:07 AM »

There's a cool device shown in the plugins section called "Powermate". After looking at it a thought crossed my mind. Is it possible to create a plugin for the volume control knobs on multimedia keyboards for jogging. I have a Dell SK-8135 keyboard with multimedia keys and a volume control knob. It would be very handy if that knob can be used for jogging. I have no experience with plugins. Maybe some programming gurus out there can answer this question.

Zafar

334

Feature Requests / Re: Different motor tuning parameters for cutting feeds and rapids

« on: July 25, 2008, 11:57:51 PM »

Yes, this is possible with macros. But you'll have to put in these macros (M commands) into the gcodes which means rewriting the post processors for your cam application.

Zafar

335

Feature Requests / Different motor tuning parameters for cutting feeds and rapids

« on: June 09, 2008, 11:43:52 PM »

The new Taiwanese and Chinese AC servo motors and drives are getting very inexpensive these days. With these we have the option of changing the electronic gear ratio during operation. Is it possible to have two sets of motor tuning parameters. One for cutting feeds and another for rapids. If mach3 could switch between the two sets of parameters during gcode execution then we can have a very fine resolution for cutting feeds and a nice rapid speed when we are not cutting. A resolution of .001mm and a rapid of 30 m/s would be possible this way within a kernel of 25 kHz. Also the X1, X10 and X100 buttons on a mpg can be programmed with it easily.

Zafar

336

Sieg Machines / Re: Does Mach3 work with the new Seig KC6 CNC lathe?

« on: November 13, 2007, 12:47:34 AM »

Of course Mach3 works with servos. The newer digital drives will hook to the mach3 directly. For analog servo drives you'll need something like Pixie to convert Step/Dir signals to analog signals.