Rich is correct on the number of lines.

When I did the heart the .dxf that I got it from it was drawn as many line segments.

I went in and changed a lot of the curves to pure arcs.
When I then went into my cam program (Deskcnc) It was able to cut them as G02s and G03s. It went from about 2500 lines down to the ~490 it no takes. Big difference.

Mike

Zero Cool,
Maybe it's time to purchase Mach instead of trying to work around the line limit.  
RICH

Smiley Face with a little extra

Rich i ABSOLUTELY will be purchasing mach! however im not ready yet. My mill is an old industrial X-Y arm that i am rebuilding into a mill. At the moment i don't know if it has the resolution or accuracy to even work! if you look at the video you can see it is crudely mounted to an old tabletop! LOL! it needs a LOT of work yet!

 I have built a new motor controller and I am still working the bugs out of it and learning how to use mach. i am not a machinist. I am an electronics tech so ALL of this is new to me. getting the mill to even move was a big step and then trying to figure out the machine co-ordinates and work offset took me watching the video 3-4 times and playing with the mill a bit and i am still having some troubles but once i got to stay within the lines and not hit the limit switches i was pretty excited. I wanted to see what it was actually doing. but with only 500 lines of the roadrunner it doesn't really look like anything. just some squiggles on the paper. SO i thought i would ask if there was a simple design that i could run for test.

For testing you can just do a rectangle, square. and a circle. The link below shows my plotter pen and it will draw out the profile quite accurately.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,16012.msg108047.html#msg108047

Have Fun,
RICH

I wonder how many lines a Smiley face would take? one round circle, 2 smaller circles and a curved line??

I just threw these together. They are 1" diameter, centered at X0 Y0. Cutting .01" deep. Just scale the X and Y to the size you want, and cut.

For what it's worth, the 500 line limit was more than enough for me to make enough money with Mach3 to pay for itself in two weeks. If you're cutting real parts, and not engraving pictures, you can do a LOT with 500 lines.

For what it's worth, the 500 line limit was more than enough for me to make enough money with Mach3 to pay for itself in two weeks.

I agree 100% I would be surprised if more than 2% of the code I have is over 500 lines. That is because I do mainly 2.5D machining to make parts, bad CAM and Engraving or full 3D milling use a lot more lines up.
The roadrunner is deliberately made of short segmented moves to test a machine rather than being a practical piece of code.
Hood

It was just so exciting to get the machine to ACTUALLY do something! To move under its own control and not me pushing buttons to make it move! I didn't want to stop playing with it. I ran the 500 lines 3-4 times just to watch it move LOL! I love the sounds the stepper motors make! Zee Zuuu ZOOOOOO hahhaha

  i am not at the point yet of figuring out how to get CAD into Gcode. but i am learning and it has been fun!

Use some of the wizards to cut pockets, sufrace material etc, it will give you a good idea how your machine is working and will have code will few lines.
Hood

I was able to run the heart and smiley face patterns today! worked great! here is a vid running the smiley face. I also figured out how to change the end of the code to rewind and re run the gcode file continuously! i was able to run the mill for 30 minutes non stop and check to see how hot the motors and the motor controller heatsink and power supply get...which was not at all! so that was another successful test today! i will run it for a couple hours next time and then take temps with an IR thermometer. but everything was cool to the touch today!

here is the vid of the smiley face

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_cNLcc8AEs