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Author Topic: Loading toolpaths directly to Mach4  (Read 2086 times)

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Loading toolpaths directly to Mach4
« on: November 27, 2016, 10:38:03 AM »
I am trying to get my Aspire toolpaths to output direct to machine (Mach4) when saving, but I keep getting the "unable to find a running instance of Mach" error... does anyone know how to correct this?

With Mach3 we had to add some registry entries to fix this problem, but those registry entries don't work in Mach4.

I posted this question over a year ago in both the Vectric and Mach forums without success (Vectric responses-- "ask Mach", Mach responses-- "ask Vectric").

Has anyone figured it out?
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Offline smurph

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Re: Loading toolpaths directly to Mach4
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2016, 01:47:50 AM »
Mach 4 will not use the DDE method like Mach 3 did.  So whatever their software did for Mach 3 will not work for Mach 4.  Mach 4 has an inter-process communications (IPC) library that could be used to accomplish the same thing.  However, that would require that Vectric compiles against this Mach 4 IPC library.  All I can say is I don't believe they have contacted us about doing anything like that.  

That being said, the next build will have a command line interface for loading files.  When Mach4GUI is running, simply calling "Mach4GUI -o <gcode file path>" will load a file.  If Mach4GUI is not running, it will launch Mach4GUI and load the specified file at startup.

Steve
Re: Loading toolpaths directly to Mach4
« Reply #2 on: December 01, 2016, 06:57:52 AM »
Thanks for replying... really wish the feature could be enabled, work flow is a lot easier when I can just load the code directly into mach after designing.
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