I'm in the process of making my own 3d printer. With that said, is there any was to link Powerpoint & Mach 3 so that when you display a slide in PP, it will send a gcode instruction to Mach? In other words....If I run a slide show in PP of 3d object slices, I would need Mach to run a couple lines of Gcode to lower or raise the Z axis by a few thousanths, thus building an object layer by layer.
The crude way to do this is to set up gcode in Mach to match the timing of the slide show....So that if the slides are on the screen for 10 seconds and there is a 3 second pause between the slides, I would want to move the Z axis between each slide so I would write the Gcode to match the proper timing ( is this even possible? Can you time your moves in gcode?). Then I would start both at the same time and hope they would stay in sync.
So....Is there any way to link the two programs? Or can Mach be set up to be triggered by an optical sensor so I can put up a trigger slide in between the regular slides to trigger the Z axis in Mach?
Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks