I made the switch to Mach4 for my DIY plasma cutter - And after many hours of struggling with scripts and a lot of back and forth with Trevor I got my own THC working. I must give credit to Mach4 since a lot of the inspired code is from the original mcTHC although it all has been rewritten.
Some changes i felt needed to happen from the original mcTHC -
- THC Adjustments rate cannot be set as a % of the max federate of a motor. This does not translate across machines. I changed this to be a % of the current XY Blend Velocity. The faster I cut, the faster the torch can move. Simply physics. I have added a dynamic mode that does take the voltage difference between target and current into account and adjust the thc rate quicker or slower.
- I removed the PID as this is too complex for general Plasma Operators, but also overkill for the small changes required. I've replaced this with a static and dynamic option.
- Sampled Voltage - When the M5 macro complete, the system will measure samples and avg a target voltage. You can specify the delay time, and samples to use.
- I changed the modes to only 2. Manual and Auto. If you enable auto, the system will switch from manual when ark ok and sample voltage completed. (If used)
- Anti Dive (Based on low feedrate) is always enabled. M62/M63 gcode to stop THC is also added. Thus you can cut slower with THC enabled.
-I've added 3 target voltage slots - Depending on the Requested Feedrate in Gcode, the target voltage is set.
Let me know if this is something you would like to try out..
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