Messages

501

Show"N"Tell ( What you have made with your CNC machine.) / Re: American Torq Thrust wheels

« on: April 09, 2017, 12:24:48 PM »

Nice!

502

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Home all axes doesn't work, but each works individually

« on: March 31, 2017, 08:34:29 AM »

Try configuring your switches to only be home switches, not limits too. If there are no limit switches enabled you will not get a limit switch error. Sounds like you might be fighting a noise issue. Might want to see if you can filter those home switch inputs in the ESS config.   

503

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Script for tool changes--- Doable? worth the effort?

« on: March 30, 2017, 08:36:41 PM »

Yah, I'm guessing if I wanted to "write" this properly with good testing and suck it would need to be a plugin... which is a whole other ball of wax..

Yup.

504

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Script for tool changes--- Doable? worth the effort?

« on: March 30, 2017, 06:58:30 PM »

Chaoticone: Software developer in me has to ask, is there any type of unit testing framework-ie-ness in Mach4 or do we just write stuff in the debugger and step through it till we are happy? 

Debugger is the only tool I have ever used and if there are other ways I don't know what they are. Naturally the core developers have more tools at their disposal using their development environments but for scripting I think the debugger is the only one.

505

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Script for tool changes--- Doable? worth the effort?

« on: March 29, 2017, 09:51:08 AM »

Well, there isn't too many things that aren't doable in lua. With manumatic tool changes the question is more of it being practical. It sounds like yours is reasonably practical. You will need to do this in 2 parts. Just keep in mind that any automated operation has to be defined by set parameters (until we achieve AI anyway). So here is the way I would do it.

1) Set conditions to manually change the tool: I would simply have the M6 move the spindle to the tool change location, turn off the spindle, coolant, etc. and update the tool number and after motion stops, do a cycle stop.

2) Change Tool: Manually change the tool.

3) Set conditions to resume Gcode execution: Then have a button that moves my spindle to the tool touch location, does the touch routine that sets the tool offset of the current tool and return the spindle to a safe location that the Gcode could be continued from. In your Gcode you would need to make sure it can go from this location to its next working move without issue and set spindle speed, turn the spindle, coolant, vacuum, etc. back on. It might be a good idea to add a move in the Gcode to go to the touch location just after the M6 to. Since it is already there it won't cause any motion but it would insure that the machine is in the position you plan to resume running from every time a M6 is called.

4) Resume Gcode execution: Then you just click Cycle Start to continue running after a tool change. Or...... at the end of your touch routine you could add the cycle start but I would save that for the very last thing after its all proved out.

506

General Mach Discussion / Re: Delta Tau Pmac and Flow waterjet

« on: March 29, 2017, 08:53:28 AM »

No, Neither Mach3 nor Mach4 will work with the Delta Tau PMAC. Your best bet would be to do a retrofit and use Mach4 with one of the controllers (AKA external motion device) that has developed a plugin for 4. If that isn't an option I do know a Delta Tau Guru that I could check with to see if he would be interested in contacting you.

507

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 logging facility

« on: March 28, 2017, 05:49:52 PM »

No problem, thanks for letting us know. That's one of those things that can be a non issue for some and a pain for others. Ill fix it in the default profiles hopefully before next release.

508

General Mach Discussion / Re: Simple Draw test??

« on: March 17, 2017, 05:10:55 PM »

You have your Y start defined in the wizard as +4.6***. Change that to 0. Also, make sure the size of the job can be ran within your soft limits. Make the text smaller if you have to for testing.

You would do yourself a big favor to take the time now to learn the basics of the Gcode programming language (machine coordinates, work coordinates, incremental moves and absolute moves and their relationship to each other) and the right hand rule. Wikipedia and CNCcookbook have a lot of good info. on Gcode.

509

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 Training Video Requests.

« on: March 17, 2017, 10:14:35 AM »

the Help doc button in the screen in Mach4 has that particular document for the touch module.

In fact, it opens the docs folder which contains all of the docs included with the Mach4 installer. For the touch module you can also click on the help tab in the modules gui to open its doc. The last thing in the doc is a link to the video at YouTube about it. Lots of ways to get to lots on learning aids.

510

General Mach Discussion / Re: Question about IsMoving...

« on: March 15, 2017, 07:07:28 PM »

The sleep should be in the While IsMoving loop....... All while IsMoving loops should have a sleep in them. Also, if you have not set dwell to milliseconds in general config. you will be sleeping for 2000 seconds instead of 2 seconds. A sleep of 200 ms should be good.

code(G00 X30 Y30 Z-7)
While IsMoving()
    Sleep 200
Wend

DoOEMButton(119)