Another plasma component...

Well, tool handling is crap.

There is something that is causing the loaded tool to be one tool change ahead of what it should be. At this stage I have no clue as to what is causing this.

If you do not change a tool during cutting you will not notice this problem, it only becomes apparent when you change a tool during a job.

If you want to play it safe you can disabled it by commenting out the following line in the ini file.

I bet Phill might like to finish his machine some day instead of chasing new features in Plasmac

John, you win that bet.

Cheers, Phill.

Phill, can you post the gcode you are using? Let somebody else check it out in case you got something wrong just to be safe.

Rod,
I am using metric_tool_change.ngc in the nc_files directory.

If definitely has problems, seems like something to do with remapping, I must be doing it wrong.

You can see when you press run that the second tool loads, it actually does load the first one but goes straight through and loads the second.

Cheers, Phill.

phillc54 wrote: Rod,
I am using metric_tool_change.ngc in the nc_files directory.

If definitely has problems, seems like something to do with remapping, I must be doing it wrong.

You can see when you press run that the second tool loads, it actually does load the first one but goes straight through and loads the second.

Cheers, Phill.

Phill, I'm no expert on gcode but according to the docs
linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/gcode/other...html#sec:select-tool

Should be
It is valid to call tool prepare (T4) well before the tool is used to give the magazine time to get ready

I'm just looking on Git so have not tried this.

rodw wrote: As you say this is not a milling machine, its a plasma machine.

Which is why I have been speculating on whether replacing "task" makes sense.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/config/ini-config.html#_task_section
The code is here:
github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/tree/master/src/emc/task
I don't know how much is relevant, redundant or reusable.

I revisited your SQL wiki page recently to see if it could be incorporated into a plasma model and there was not one relevant data entity for plasma.

Well, one point of a database is that anyone can add their own dates items, and as long as the expected ones also exist, there is no problem. (whereas adding new items to the current tool table is a problem)

andypugh wrote:

rodw wrote: As you say this is not a milling machine, its a plasma machine.

Which is why I have been speculating on whether replacing "task" makes sense.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/config/ini-config.html#_task_section
The code is here:
github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/tree/master/src/emc/task
I don't know how much is relevant, redundant or reusable.

I revisited your SQL wiki page recently to see if it could be incorporated into a plasma model and there was not one relevant data entity for plasma.

Well, one point of a database is that anyone can add their own dates items, and as long as the expected ones also exist, there is no problem. (whereas adding new items to the current tool table is a problem)

Andy, I could see how a plasma task would work so its food for thought and a pretty big Task to implement I think. But it would get access to start spindle to do all of the touch off stuff and total control over what the tool table looks like so its food for thought.

As far as changing the tool table fields, its more than that as the tables themselves are not applicable to plasma (eg totally wrong data entities)

Imagine if all the user had to do to implement a plasma machine was change one line in the ini file!

If I had more time at my disposal, I might even be tempted to try. How would the plasma task be incorporated into the build process?