Re: CNC Pro?

Great explanation.

After finally installing and playing with the free version of Mach3 I
can see it has some canned G-codes. That's helpful. But the Wizards
are the equivalent of the canned cycles I've seen on pro systems that
I was looking for. It was impressive that most of them were written by
users. The instructional videos were fantastic.

The only downside is that this would require updating to Windows 2000
or the hard drive made into a dual boot drive so I can still use my
old files with CNCPro in 98 and Mach3 with 2000. Hmmm.

I tried opening some of my old files with Mach3. It wasn't happy about
them for some reason. I'd go thru and have to hit reset and stop in
sequence even though they were already off, in order to get my old
code to start running. I was using Mach3 2.0.034. It would run after
that. Maybe I need some lines of code to set Mach3 into motion. My old
files are dead simple, maybe too simple.

Mike

--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com, Lester Caine <lsces@...> wrote:
>
> Mike Phillips wrote:
>
> > Having canned cycles would be fantastic. Professional
> > software/hardware packages have that built in. Doesn't Mach3 have
> > wizards that generate g-code quickly? Maybe that's nearly a canned
> > cycle feature. I would like to skip the cad step altogether for many
> > easy items.
> This is one of the best features of Mach3 - along with LazyCAM.
> Those little jobs that it's not worth doing a drawing for are somewhat
> painless in Mach3.
>
> > Less steps are better!
> I think it depends on the type of job, but in general I find all I have
> to do is create the profiles I need ( not a full CAD drawing just the
> outlines ) process them to provide gCode and then just run the gCode. I
> don't think you can get fewer steps than that. Of cause producing a full
> dimensioned drawing for the records is essential but to a certain extent
> it's a side path. The elements you need for CAM are not necessarily the
> ideal ones for CAD, and it is often better to think about additional sub
> drawings then trying to extract the appropriate profiles from a pure CAD
> one. Layers with the profile for a particular height become one element
> in a dimensioned drawing :(
>
> --
> Lester Caine - G8HFL
> -----------------------------
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>