Hi,
I hope this is in the correct place, but if it isn't MODs please feel free to move it. It's possibly an odd
question, it didn't really seem to fit anywhere.
I want to convert my Laser cutter to run on Mach3 (That should be the easy bit, I only use it for cutting out simple shapes, so no engraving required).
After I've done that I want to create an "auto loader" for the laser cutter. What this will be is essentially a pick and place robot, it will pick a
sheet of material up and place it into the laser cutter using a vacuum plate. When the laser has finished cutting the job, the same pick-and place robot will remove the finished work and place it in a pile of finished jobs. Since my input material is always the same and my jobs always take a full sheet, this should be straightforward.
So, the goal is to be able to give the machine a list of jobs to make, and be able to leave it to make them all, loading and
unloading the laser cutter itself.
My question is how can make mach3 act on signals from the inputs to tell it to close the current file, open the next one.
I know how to convert the laser to Mach3 and I know how to build the pick and place bot, but I don't know how to
get mach3 to open and close the files. The only solution I've come up with it to put all of the separate G-codes into one big
file with a break between each one to control the loader-unloader bot, but I'm sure there must be a better solution ?
This may be unrealistic, it's just an idea in the "scribbled on the back of an envelope" stage the moment, but it's something
I'd like to try, it would save me an awful lot of time loading and unloading the laser cutter!
I hope it makes some sense!
Thanks for reading and for any help anyone can give.
Guest
