Post Processor for LinuxCNC and PlasmaC

I am wondering what post processor you find to work the best for Linux cnc and plasmac. Right now I’m just using the Sheetcam demo but if it’s that good I will buy it. Especially if thy decide to make a special post processor for us.

Hi JT,

Rod has sent me a copy of his Sheetcam post processor and his toolset,

I have attached them to this post,

I would very much recommend Sheetcam,

I have spoken to a Hypertherm Australian dealer about there pronest software and it was going to cost $10,000 AUD for a basic version that doesnt have the same features as Sheetcam.

I just finished getting a working post processor for sheetcam this afternoon. It needs a bit of cleaning up yet but I cut some stuff. Very exciting. I will post a video on the main plasmac thread cutting up and down a 13 degree slope.

I'm hoping Les at sheetcam will write a post processor for it once we have a stable config.

thefabricator03 wrote:

Hi JT,

Rod has sent me a copy of his Sheetcam post processor and his toolset,

I have attached them to this post,

I would very much recommend Sheetcam,

I have spoken to a Hypertherm Australian dealer about there pronest software and it was going to cost $10,000 AUD for a basic version that doesnt have the same features as Sheetcam.

Once the new Sheetcam Post is written for Plasmac I will upload a Hypertherm Toolset if anyone is interested.

Geeze, you guys are impatient. Here is this afternoon's effort using the new M190 command
I've also attached the output so you can have alook at it. As I said, the POST needs a lot of cleaning up but it works

This should get you going. Don't forget that if you have a sheetcam toolset, you can xport it and convert it to plasmac with the materialverter.py script in the plasmac config folder. Run it with python materialverter.py from the command line. Just delete the .txt from the post file.

Just looking at the generated gcode above and there seems to be some extra F codes in there so sheetcam is overriding our plasmac settings. I have hacked out a good 300 lines of redundant code this morning so I will look for that if what I've done actually still works!

phillc54 wrote:

Rod,
One thing you need to remember is that the F word MUST be after the M66 line so that it reads the feed rate from the correct material.

Cheers, Phill.

Phil, yes, thats all fixed now. The guys seemed to be impatient so I did your trick and did about 47 new versions in 24 hours.

For the followers, I have uploaded a new version on another thread. This zip file includes the post processor, a sample dxf file and the generated output from Sheetcam where I made a seperate layer for the holes and used a Sheetcam tool with a special name "CenterPunch" to mark the hole centres. Its only a small file so even guys with the free version of sheetcam should be able to play with this.
You can download it from here.
forum.linuxcnc.org/media/kunena/attachme...0/Postsamples.tar.gz

How are you setting X0 and Y0 on your machine. I did not see any call outs for offsetting from the machine zero/home position.

JTknives wrote:

How are you setting X0 and Y0 on your machine. I did not see any call outs for offsetting from the machine zero/home position.

We are using the default Gmoccappy touchoff buttons for X & Y touchoffs. There are blueish buttons for each axis.