Hi,
is there a Mach4 post for Fusion?
I'm not really up to date with Fusion but I don't think there is a specific post for Mach4, most users carry on using the post for Mach3.
Whether any alterations have to be made is more than I can answer.
The toolchange macro M6 is another matter entirely. As you no doubt are aware that an M6 which works on one machine, even a manual
toolchange may well crash another machine, and just about every machine is different.
In the Mach4Hobby/LuaExamples/ToolChanger folder you will find some very basic toolchange M6 scripts that have been supplied by NFS,
in the hopes that one or more of them may, with a little tweaking, suit your machine. I would recommend you have a look to see if one may
work for you and/or at the very least show you some of the techniques that are available to you to tweak an example to your circumstances
or even writing an entirely original script.
Without more information about your machine I could not give you any specific instructions as how to proceed. There are a few general ideas,
and one or two quirks that you need to be aware of if you go to modify or write anew.
The first is that M6 is a basic macro within Machs core. Whenever the GCode interpreter encounters an M6 call it executes it. If however you write your own
Mach will check that first, if it finds a complying M6 it will execute that instead, if it doesn't find one it executes its own M6 from within the core.
First quirk: Machs Gcode interpreter converts all alphanumeric data to lowercase and strips out leading zeros. Thus:
M6
M06
m6
m06
m006
all refer to the same thing. When Mach reads a line of code and it includes a 'M06' that you hand coded it will actually look for 'm6'
in its macro directory. Windows is ambivalent about uppercase/lowercase so Mach will find what its looking for.....mostly!!!
I would highly recommend that you code all Gcode in lowercase without leading zeros. The few occasions where Mach does not identify
M06 correctly will throw a fault that will DO YOUR HEAD IN BIGTIME!
Second quirk: is not really a quirk at all but a setting which determines how Mach will interpret an line like M6 T5 say.
There are two options, the first is that Mach will stop and execute the toolchange an will fit tool 5. This is natural to you and I but there is
another interpretation especially popular with industrial/production CNCers. Mach encounters M6 T5, it stops and executes the toolchange
but fits the tool in the carousel currently and then puts tool 5 in the carousel to be fitted at the NEXT toolchange. This has the advantage
of being fast.
If you are unaware and have a M6 which is meant to operate in one mode but the machine installation is set to the other mode
then the toolchange screws up royally! Its not often at all clear what the fault is.....you'd swear Mach has gone insane. You need to decide
on what toolchange mode suits you, make the setting in Configure/Control/Tools and write your code accordingly.
Craig
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