Hi josh,
best place your question on the Mach4 General Discussion board.
1. The ESS or Mach seems to be rounding off some of the corners of my carves and it doesn't make sense. I generate toolpaths with VCarve Pro and have a lot of experience on our other machines, none of those seem to do this so it seems the ESS is the likely culprit, but I'd love suggestions.
There are two different questions to be answered here.
Firstly its not uncommon for Mach to display a toolpath which seems to take shortcuts to get around corners but the machine does not in fact take
those shortcuts. My understanding is the the toolpath display may have a different 'resolution' than the actual toolpath. This seems to happen when the
feed rate is high and you zoom in on a particular part of the toolpath display. I see this quite a bit when making PCBs. I regard it as a quirk of
Machs display as it does not get reflected in the finished result.
The second question is when the toolpath IS being 'blended' and indeed the toolpath does take shortcuts around corners. Mach is the trajectory planner
and it decides how the toolpath has to be to met its objectives. The ESS just carries out the trajectory. If a stepper cannot keep up with the ESS generated moves,
which are in turn specified by Machs trajectory, then the stepper either misses steps or stalls.
There are a number of influences on when and by how much a toolpath will be blended. Obviously if you select 'ExactStop' mode then NO toolpath blending will
occur. If, as 99% of users do, you use 'Constant Velocity' mode then blending does happen. In that circumstance there are some tuning parameters that you can tweak
but by far and away the most important fact is max machine acceleration. The faster the machine can accelerate the better it will follow a toolpath, any toolpath.
High acceleration is more important than high axis speed and often times is actually more important to overall cycle time than max velocity.
I suggest tune your machine to its highest reliable acceleration....even at modest expense of axis speed. Mach uses the max acceleration (in the motor tuning page)
to determine its CV strategy.
Craig