Another plasma component...

Thank you. I’m still in the process of trying to get my damn controller to stick to my plasma table . It keeps fallowing me back into the living room.

JTknives

I think that you will be surprised about how few material tables you will need. Almost all carbon steels cut with the same parameters for each thickness and most stainless steels will cut with the same parameters for the same thickness. Then you will also find with the thinner stainless sheets they actually cut quite well at the carbon steel cut height only a little slower. Always start at book specs. I found this out with my old commercial system as the THC kept driving the torch into the material at .02" cut height, I tried cutting at .062 a little slower and never went back. I actually couldn't tell any difference in cut quality! It may have been better because it didn't have the torch drag marks on the sheet.

John

rodw wrote:
Just a question. Will the GUI update itself to reflect the selection that is made from gcode?

Yes it does.

tommylight wrote:
Also a decision should have been made regarding CAM, not chasing back and forth the CAM and post processor issues. <<< whoever thinks this is not OK, please read the entire thread before posting about this.

Using the material file or using a 'tool change' (I guess this should be called a material change) is not a requirement, if none is specified then all the cut parameters may be set from the run tab.
The only requirement in gcode is F#<_hal[plasmac.cut-feed-rate]> to set the feed rate and M3S1 to start the ball rolling.
I am not interested in any particular CAM, I have used FreeCad on my mill and I used the Inkscape/GcodeTools way to test out my X/Y axis. I am happy to try to write converters to allow creating a plasmac material file from other tool files as I have done for SheetCam which are the only ones I have seen and which I doubt I will use myself.

Yes, writing a proper How To is going to be a bunch of fun :lol:

Cheers, Phill.

phillc54 wrote:

Yes, writing a proper How To is going to be a bunch of fun :lol:

Cheers, Phill.

Particularly if you work with the arcane docs editor used in the linuxcnc environment. I hope Andy pops in and points you in the right direction on that one!

I started looking at a post processor for sheetcam and I've emailed Les Newall who wrote it and hope he will help. The tool table really only needs one field in it to work with this (The sheetcam tool number) . Hopefully the resulting post will be deployed with sheetcam.

phillc54 wrote: I am happy to try to write converters to allow creating a plasmac material file from other tool files as I have done for SheetCam which are the only ones I have seen and which I doubt I will use myself.

I think when we are done, I'll be asking you to write one the other way. Export a plasmac materials file to a sheetcam tool table!

I have pushed the new basic material handling update. There a quite a few file changes...

Most of the code changes are in these:
There is one new file which is the M code for the material change:
The inifiles have all references to remap removed,
All ngc files have the new feed rate code
The material_change_ngc files have material handling and cutter offset code
The README.md file has been modified, I would appreciate feedback on this, good or bad...
The tool verter has been renamed to materialverter in keeping with the other changes:
All remap files have been deleted:
I have also removed the following so in future they won't overwrite your local files:
I hope I have finally got it right, it has been a challenge...

This doesn't yet have:
Set IHS skip type to match THC mode.
HAL pin for THC disable.
THC start delay.

These are in the pipeline, I need a beer break now.

Cheers, Phill.