I am one of the poor fools stuck trying to find a decent way to control a laser with Mach3. The laser plugin works 'sometimes', but it crashes unexpectedly and always gives me the 'previous SEQ not completed' statement. Perhaps I was foolish to throw away the old Chinese driver that came with my laser. Okay, enough history.
Is there a way for me to write a variable in Gcode that will not be a machine code that pauses the motion? I was hoping that there was some variable that could be seen by a brain and have the brain turn my laser on and off. I have spent days playing with Mcodes and slow VB scripts with little success. I have also tried simply changing the spindle speed parameter and tying my laser to it with a brain, but I see that Mach3 also pauses when it receives the new speed setting (even though all internal delays are set to zero). I have also done the trick of using the direction bit for the Z axis to fire the laser. Even with Z depths of -0.001 and super high speed settings for the fake Z motor I am still getting the jerky machine pauses when rastering the X motion.
I would like to create my gcode as before using small Z motions for laser on-off, but then I would use the find and replace feature of a text editor to change Z0.0 and Z-.001 to this new variable that will not be interpreted by a slow VB script but will instead be seen and immediately acted upon by the brain.