I recently upgraded Mach3 to Mach4 and now I can't get the rotary axis to work. When running a rotary job that worked fine in Mach3, the X axis moves back and forth instead of rotating the A axs (the job is aligned along the Y axis). I don't have Mach3 installed on my computer any longer, but I seem to recall there was a setting to map X axis movements to the A axis to do rotary jobs. I can't find anything in the setting of Mach4. What am I missing in setting up Mach4 to do rotary jobs?

Perhaps: Configure->Control
General tab
Rotary axis
tick the box for the axis you want to roll over

HTH

RT

Hi,

the X axis moves back and forth instead of rotating the A axs (the job is aligned along the Y axis).

That technique is well and truly dead....it was at best a workaround to be able to have slave axes in Mach3.

In Mach4 however there is a much MUCH better way. Any Mach4 axis, lets say axis 0, which is commonly the X axis, can have up to four slave motors. No need to shag about calling an A axis an X axis slave
or any of that rubbish.

Secondly ANY Mach axis can be either linear4 OR rotary, as posted by rhtuttle, but whats more they can be programmatically manipulated on-the-fly throughout a Mach session
using APIs like:

LUA Syntax:
rc = mc.mcAxisMapMotor(
number mInst,
number axisId,
number motorId)

Description:
Map a motor to an axis.

Craig

Not sure if it is possible or not.  My method would be to create a gcode string with the 'f' parameter calculated to the speed you want and distance in a relative mode
local speed=(read a value from a register or screen dro or have a speed for this script)*1
mcCntlGgodeExecute(inst, "g91 g1 f"..tostring(speed).." x.1 g90")
This is a quick example syntax may be incorrect but you should get the drift.

HTH

RT