Another plasma component...

tommylight wrote:

Sorry all, but i have recused myself from this thread due to it moving in a direction i can not agree with.

In what way Tommy. We value your input.

tommylight wrote:

Sorry all, but i have recused myself from this thread due to it moving in a direction i can not agree with.

Tom,

You are one of the main reasons I have decided to ditch my CandCNC setup for LinuxCNC. I have over $10,000 AUD invested in the CandCNC package but reading your posted based on your experience has made me realize my problems with CandCNC can be solved by moving to the open source system you have put alot of time and effort into.

I would really appreciate if you continued expressing your opinion on the development of plasma component. Having your input helps a lot more people than you might realize. I lurked these forums for a long time before I posted and I am sure there are others doing the same.

Guys

This will most likely no be a very popular position. I think that I can safely say that I have cut the most metal of anyone using the Plasmac branch. At the present time it works very well and only lacks one feature I need and I have hacked that in myself. Most job shops or engineering type users will never use this feature. Now the fact of the matter is most hobby or small shop users don't need a 100s of entries tool (or cut parameter) table for everyday work. The scale of the present Plasmac ones and the ease of entering new parameters makes me question the need for the all singing all dancing tool handling methods. Most people use a single tool for an entire sheet with the possible exception of smallish holes which are usually covered with special codes. So I will go so far as to say Phill has produced a really wonderful product that has taken LinuxCNC plasma cutting to a whole new level. May I be so bold as to suggest that now is the time to take a good look look around and consider what the future of LinuxCNC may look like and find collaborators from different areas to move forward with modern screen builders (the various QT stuff I know nothing about) and maybe an as yet undefined universal tool handling method. I bet Phill might like to finish his machine some day instead of chasing new features in Plasmac. I seem to recall that Python 2.7 is rapidly nearing the end of life and we are still stuck using Glade 2 for GUIs here.

Well if you guy's want to hear my 2 cents it is a topic that doesn't even belong here. Will someone please take the Gcodetools foundation (open source) in Inkscape and make a really good CAM with nesting application out of it. This will make a complete open source tool chain for plasma and milling. While pretty crude the underlying code in Gcodetools does produce nice Gcode for cutting if you can get past the UI.

John

Well lets just run with what Phill has got now, tidy up anything left unfinished and push the powers that be to get it into master branch ASAP.

We can all follow John's hack to enable/disable the THC.

BigJohn has done some work on nesting already.

A sheetcam post processor would be a nice inclusion before its pushed. Maybe one of us can contribute that. How clean is yours John? Mine still has a lot of CandCNC stuff in it but it still retains the centre punch option. All of the CandCNC fields need deleting and a toolId added.

Has the RS485 component for setting air pressure and amperage from g code been added to Plasmac?

Rod did send it to me but I was wondering if it should be added officially before the push to master branch.

Also the only other thing I can think of that I would personally like to see would be a way to control a air scribe.

Or would I be better off controlling that entirely though the post processor? Or possibly though a tool that activates a output? is that possible?