Messages

11

General Mach Discussion / Re: COM API

« on: November 13, 2009, 05:47:04 PM »

Basically we need to move a stylus across a flat touch panel surface.  The stylus will be mounted to the Z axis arm with a spring-loaded mechanism so we can move it around easily.  The test program will move the stylus around in a general back-and-forth pattern.  For example:

1) Start at a particular X,Y location
2) Move 3in to the right
3) Move 0.5in down
4) Move 3in to the left
5) Move 0.5in down
.....

As the stylus moves across the surface, our test program will capture data from the touch panel.  We need one program to control both the stylus location and the touch panel so we can correlate specific X,Y locations with specific data.

12

General Mach Discussion / COM API

« on: November 13, 2009, 05:14:33 PM »

My company purchased a desktop CNC machine and a copy of Mach 3 to use for some automated testing.  I need to write a program that controls the stepper motor positions and captures some data from our sensor.  I'm a software programmer and don't know anything about CNC machines or G-Code (other than what little research I've done today).  I found one message one this forum where someone talked about using VB.NET to send commands via the "COM API", but I couldn't find any other references to the API or to controlling the unit with external software.

Can someone point to a reference manual, sample code, etc. that shows how I can interact with Mach 3 programmatically to do what I need?  I'm not really picky about how it gets done since this is for research use only, not production.  For example, I'd be OK with writing out a G-Code script file and then executing Mach 3 with a command call if that's possible.