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41

General Mach Discussion / Re: Controlling Mach with Powerpoint? Is this possible?

« on: May 16, 2011, 01:37:17 PM »

The images need to be shown on-screen so they can be projected onto the UV curable resin. The computer needs to output the images to a DLP projector and Powerpoint will do that. You can't generate them right to gcode, they need to be diplayed on the monitor as raster images, this is what cures the resin layer by layer.

42

General Mach Discussion / Re: Controlling Mach with Powerpoint? Is this possible?

« on: May 16, 2011, 01:00:45 PM »

I'm not making an extruder-type printer. It will be a stereo lithography-type printer so I only need to move the Z axis. There will be no XY movement.

Yes, that's what I am asking here. How to trigger Mach to run gcode for each slide.

Another solution (possibly easier) would be to use an optical sensor attached to the monitor so in between each slide, there will be a blank slide with a small graphic shape that pops up under the sensor that will trigger Mach to advance the Z axis - this is another technique that will work if possible for Mach to do.

43

General Mach Discussion / Controlling Mach with Powerpoint? Is this possible?

« on: May 16, 2011, 12:58:44 AM »

I'm in the process of making my own 3d printer. With that said, is there any was to link Powerpoint & Mach 3 so that when you display a slide in PP, it will send a gcode instruction to Mach?   In other words....If I run a slide show in PP of 3d object slices, I would need Mach to run a couple lines of Gcode to lower or raise the Z axis by a few thousanths, thus building an object layer by layer.

The crude way to do this is to set up gcode in Mach to match the timing of the slide show....So that if the slides are on the screen for 10 seconds and there is a 3 second pause between the slides, I would want to move the Z axis between each slide so I would write the Gcode to match the proper timing ( is this even possible? Can you time your moves in gcode?). Then I would start both at the same time and hope they would stay in sync.


So....Is there any way to link the two programs?  Or can Mach be set up to be triggered by an optical sensor so I can put up a trigger slide in between the regular slides to trigger the Z axis in Mach? 

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks