Hi Gang!
I'm really enjoying this CNC stuff!
A couple of things.
MY EDA program puts out a g54 code for my PCB drills. Trouble is that it is mills (.001 inches) and I can't convert it to inches when I load the code. Is there a simple way to convert the mills in Mach3?

I can run it in D2NC and it works but it's a little bit of a pain to build the files for each tool change.

Also is there a way to stop the program for tool changes? I know about the g-code but my machine just runs past it. I'm going to set up an optical sensor for my spindle, when i stop the spindle will the program wait till it restarts before advancing?

I'm running a Sherline 2000 mill.

Thanks for the help,
Rob

You say mills but have thou in the brackets so I am not really sure what you are meaning. If your code has X100 but what that really means is 0.1inch then you could use the scale DROs to resize the code, ie put 0.001 in the scale DROs. If however you are doing this code all the time and nothing else then best way would just be to adjust the steps per unit to suit. If you were doing some code like that and other normal code then writing a macro to automatically set the Scale DROs would probably be the best solution.
Hood

Yes, 1 mill = .001 inches.

My g-code loads from my EDA program as: x04650 which is in mills as opposed to x04.650 in inches which is how I need it.

Ok must be a difference in the way we call things, in the UK as far as I am aware 0.001 is 1 thousandth and 0.0001 is one tenthousandth. No matter anyway, the scale DRO would do it for you, basically you just set it to whatever your code is. eg if it is normally as in your example then you would divide by 1000 so if you set the X scale DRO to 0.001 and comanded a X04650 move it would actually only move 4.650inches.

Is that the only code you will ever run or will you also run normal code?

Hood