Messages

71

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply Unit

« on: January 31, 2011, 12:23:43 AM »

Agreed, my sentiments exactly .

72

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply Unit

« on: January 30, 2011, 10:56:49 PM »

Nicolas,
I know better than to butt in but re capacitors………………
I think you are seeing viewpoints from two opposite sides of the spectrum. Perhaps (just guessing) one from a professional who designs commercial products to meet a certain spec and a hobbyist that just wants to build something that will do what he wants with the parts at hand (even tho it's not optimal). I say don't worry about the second decimal when dealing with components that have a 20% tolerance to begin with. Try to stay in the ballpark and it should turn out just fine. Our steppers may not be operating at 100% (how would we know?) but if they are doing what we want then as hobbyist we are happy. Ignorance is bliss.
Al
P.S. Fire away, I'm flameproof<grin>
P.S.S. I deeply respect the wealth of knowledge of both of the above unnamed posters.
AL

73

General Mach Discussion / Re: Pocket Wizard by Brian / Kiran

« on: January 23, 2011, 04:07:14 PM »

Whew! Glad it worked. My batting avg can stand all the help it can get
al

74

General Mach Discussion / Re: Pocket Wizard by Brian / Kiran

« on: January 22, 2011, 11:07:57 AM »

Try this change:

Code "G0 Z" & Zjob+(-1 * DEPTH) + Clearance
Code "G01 Z" & Zjob+(-1 * DEPTH) & " F" & FeedPlunge

In adition you will need to pass the value of the variables to the sub: (two places each;  note that  "Clearance" was missed too)

Call Finish_ClimbMill(Xpos, Ypos, length, Width, DEPTH, RadTool, finishamount, FeedPlunge, FeedRough, Feedfinish, ZJob, Clearance)

Sub Finish_ClimbMill(Xpos, Ypos, length, Width, DEPTH, RadTool, finishamount, FeedPlunge, FeedRough, Feedfinish, ZJob, Clearance)

That should do it.
al

75

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply Unit

« on: January 19, 2011, 03:03:23 AM »

Nicolas,
Re. your power supply enclosure. I built up a power supply that used the identical 24V MPJ transformer that you first selected. It all fit rather nicely into an old scrap desktop PC power supply case. I scrapped the electronics and only kept the metal case, cooling fan and power cord. A piece of Radio Shack printed circuit board mounted on standoffs was used to mount the components.  Milled some straight line trace isolation cuts in the copper to end up with an equivalent printed circuit board.  The newer PC power supply cases are a bit smaller but then I think the toridal transformer that you intend to use will be considerably smaller than the rather huge MPJ one that I used. And old PC’s are essentially free.
I couldn’t believe the prices quoted for metal enclosures.  So I made a separate one for the drives out of inexpensive Ace hardware acrylic sheet. Just couldn’t see spending more for an empty metal box than the electronic components that went inside. Of course a proper metal enclosure even tho a bit more expensive would result in a more porofessional job.
Al
P.S.
Disclaimer: I’m not qualified to make any recommendations where electricity is involved but note that the plastic case only has low-voltage components and the potentially lethal mains voltages are in a grounded metal case. I am sure that there are technical reasons why this is not good practice, but the bottom line is that it has been 100% trouble free for going on ten years now.
al

76

General Mach Discussion / Re: 4th axis setup cheat sheet

« on: January 12, 2011, 02:18:02 AM »

Yes according to my calcs you are correct all the way, ref spreadsheet at
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,16315.0.html
to see result of various input parameters.
Al

77

General Mach Discussion / Re: New program for pipe coping

« on: January 10, 2011, 06:10:03 AM »

TP

I only have a small tabletop mill, (no plasma) but I read and study your posts for the informative content.  An observation or two re. your Tube Coping program and a question if you don’t mind?

On the first run it went into an endless loop on loading. Fix, check ‘Ignore M calls while loading’ in Gen Config. Not   sure exactly why but it was relataed to the Regen Toolpath, OEMButton 160 statement.

Next the A-axes Radius DRO didn’t update. Fix, add ‘SetOEMDRO(825, GetVar(100)/2)’ to Macro M1222. I probably just missed an update to your code postings.

Lastly, how do you get the program to pause after the macro call? It seems it has to do again with the Regen Toolpath statement. This would be a nice feature if I understood how it worked?

Thanks for posting your code,
I'm still trying to learn,
al

78

General Mach Discussion / Re: Heads up on CADCAM offer from Dolphin UK

« on: December 31, 2010, 09:31:09 PM »

Like my first time in a fish and chips shop. I politely asked for "Two orders of fish and chips please" only to get a blank look. My lady friend reordered with "Piece and four twice". I learned later that it was cool to add "and a six of peas". That was 50 years ago, prices have probably gone up! Four pence worth of chips might not even be one bite now.
al

79

General Mach Discussion / Re: Plasma tube cutting

« on: December 31, 2010, 08:40:09 PM »

What I am trying to do is supply Mach with the radius from the G-code instead of entering it in Mach every time.

You can set it from G-code with a Macro:

M666 P1.2345

Pass the radius with the P word.
The Macro only needs one line:

SetOEMDRO(825, Param1 ())

Hope this helps
Al

80

General Mach Discussion / Re: I need help to make this subrutine run.

« on: December 07, 2010, 10:20:54 PM »

Actually X and Y don’t necessarily ‘have’ to be zero for the line to ‘run’, it’s just that the arcs wont have a common center. The criteria for the G2 and G3 is that the start and end points must both lie on the same circle. For example you can modify your sample code snippet like this and it will run OK:

%
M98 P1 L6
M30 (required for sub)

O1
G91
G2 X1.0 Y0.0 I0.5 J0.0 z-0.06 F20.0 (change X from 0 to 1.0)
M99
%

It doesn’t matter to Mach where the start point is, (it’s actually whatever is currently entered in the X and Y DRO’s). It is telling Mach to draw an arc whose center is ½ inch to the right of the start and with the end one inch to the right of the start. Thus both points lie on the same one inch dia circle and so no prob. The next iteration thru the sub will use the current end point as the new start. An interesting exercise is to try entering various values in the X and Y DRO’s and note the effect.


As an aside I discovered (counter to what I said above ) that changing the X from 0 to 1.50 in the above code doesn’t throw an error which it should in my opinion. Per the manual it is an error if the start and end radius lengths don’t agree within 0.0002 inch. I seem to remember Art changing this tolerance sometime back (because round off was causing an error if not enough decimal places were being used?).  But ½ inch seems pretty gross. It plots as a series of 1 ½ in wide 180 deg spirals (not true semicircles) end to end.
Can anyone shed light on this? 
Al