Bob La Londe wrote:

"Pete C." wrote in message
ster.com...

Bob La Londe wrote:

I have been playing with my new little Taig CNC setup. Getting it layed
out
just right was a it of a pain, but I think I have everything except a
perfect tru vertical on the head. Its close enough for most of my work
though.

Getting my mind around teh simple concept of basing the directions as if
the
head was mvoving relative to the table kinda screwed me, but when I did I
went OH! Duh! LOL.

I have been using LazyCam, Mach 3, Inkscape, and Corel Draw as my tools
so
far.

Well, so far it looks like the easiest free software to use is Inkscape
to
convert rastor to vector graphics. The problem is lazy cam can't handle
much detail. It will handle PLAIN SVG files output from Inkscape. Just
not
with much detail.

On the positive side its pretty easy to just make a project out of a
bunch
of little files, use lazy cam to convert them to code, then cut and paste
them together, and edit some of the dimensions. Lazy Cam does some weird
things to the Z dimension for some reason. I've broken a couple
engraving
points because of it until I relaized what was happenening. That or had
to
re cut a project because it set a bunch of the runs at Z0.0000 for no
good
reason.

I may sit down and write my own little text editor with its own process
to
check for out of whack dieemenions. Maybe editing my G-code in a spread
would make it easy to search for or conditions before running.

Now I guess I need to sit down and read the Inkscape manual to make
modeling
in 3D a little easier. Its got some cool tools to do it though.
Inkscape
is not quite intuitive in doing 3D modeling, but its not bad.

Bob La Londe
www.YumaBassMan.com

I'd suggest you focus on using the dry run functionality in Mach3 to
validate your G code before breaking engraving tools or interrupting
runs to fix Z0 issues.

Um... ok.... how is that going to show me the difference between a Z0 vs a
Z-0.0005?

Look from the side at a close enough view.


I would be more interested in finding out why LazyCam doing it to
begin with. What I found that fixed the problem for now was to go over the
code and do a find replace using my text editor before running it. Its kind
of odd though when you select all chains and set them to the same depth that
some wind up being set to a different depth. I may scrap LazyCam if I can't
figure out why that is happening. I've got a couple other CAMs that have
post processors for Mach 3 to try.