Messages

201

General Mach Discussion / Re: Do i need a bigger pc for mach..

« on: September 02, 2009, 08:19:59 PM »

Another vote for coding by hand, my power divider only came out as a few Kb for both sides. Windows Notepad all the way.

202

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: 5 Axis Mill (Trunion type), with Arm ATC, and Pallet changer control.

« on: September 02, 2009, 08:14:47 PM »

Very interesting! nice work on the cabinet, mine looks a bit like the crack-smoking spiders actually fitted the wires. It was all neat, and I found a few corrections to do, and a few upgrades, and off it went.

I'll be keeping an eye out to see this one up and running, good luck

203

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: CNC Pipe Bender

« on: September 02, 2009, 05:07:21 PM »

Just seen this - Excellent work, very useful. More uses for Mach I hadn't thought of! I hadn't really considered where bent-up fuel lines came from. Very impressed.

204

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3

« on: August 31, 2009, 07:16:41 PM »

Also make sure you've enables the axes and set up your motor tuning to some realistic (if imaginary) values, or it may not play. Had this problem on a laptop recently that I was using for simulation only.

205

Share Your GCode / Re: Soft Start for Spindle Motor G Code Routine

« on: August 31, 2009, 04:51:43 PM »

^Also good, and more practical in use

206

General Mach Discussion / Re: USING DIFFERENT STEPS PER UNIT

« on: August 30, 2009, 07:50:02 PM »

No, just use the motor tuning menus to allow for the different screw pitches. Set up the steps per unit for each axis.

mixing metric and imperial screws may give you problems as you can only have one set of native units

207

General Mach Discussion / Re: Line Limit with License

« on: August 29, 2009, 07:04:05 PM »

Yeah, had me stumped for ages.

Just to keep it all polite and happy I always make G and M commands three characters long and capitalised: ie G00, G01, G02 so that I can see at a glance if there are any missing characters. Similarly dimensions are always written to two decimal places (or three, depending on the program) Again, with the code written like this I can see at a glance if there are any missing characters.

208

Share Your GCode / Re: 10-blade pump impeller- G68 demonstration

« on: August 29, 2009, 06:48:57 PM »

Ah, ok, thanks. I'll do that.

So far so good with Mach3, I have a lot of confidence in it, and had assumed until now that it was me being dumb. tool comp would be useful in G68 thanks.

209

Tangent Corner / Re: CNC fire hazzard.

« on: August 29, 2009, 02:17:54 PM »

Oh, misery

I've got my bases covered, my mill came with an overload cutout on the spindle contactor. Triggering this estops the whole thing and it slams to a stop with no power to spindle or drives. Shame this one didn't have such an arrangement.

210

General Mach Discussion / Re: Lathe spindle brake

« on: August 29, 2009, 01:57:41 PM »

Not sure if it helps but my mill has a pure hardware braking solution - the brake (1)  contactor has a delay module on top which waits 250 ms when triggered, so the brake comes off, and 250ms later the spindle contactor (2) is triggered to start the spindle. The brake reapplies instantly if the spindle is shut off.

Reversing is similar, the reversing contactor (3) is triggered by an output, and as it closes it triggers the brake contactor (1) which triggers the spindle contactor (2) as normal and completes the circuit.

This way at least you can keep the software side simple and rely on dumb mechanical stuff to do the essentials.