Post Processor for LinuxCNC and PlasmaC

So lets say you design a cool single piece bumper for your jeep in Solidworks and its time to cut 20 flat patterns out of sheet metal ready to be folded up on a brake press. You save your part as a DXF file and load it in Sheetcam. You choose the material and then you nest your 20 parts on a single sheet of steel.

Then you run the post processor in Sheetcam and that converts your file in to gcode based on the rules in a text file that is part of sheetcam (your POST) You set your CNC plasma cutter up for that job, load the gcode file into plasmac and press the start button. The generated gcode loads the appropriate plasmac material to set the cutting parameters.

So that is the CAD/CAM workflow.

rodw wrote:

So lets say you design a cool single piece bumper for your jeep in Solidworks and its time to cut 20 flat patterns out of sheet metal ready to be folded up on a brake press. You save your part as a DXF file and load it in Sheetcam. You choose the material and then you nest your 20 parts on a single sheet of steel.

Then you run the post processor in Sheetcam and that converts your file in to gcode based on the rules in a text file that is part of sheetcam (your POST) You set your CNC plasma cutter up for that job, load the gcode file into plasmac and press the start button. The generated gcode loads the appropriate plasmac material to set the cutting parameters.

So that is the CAD/CAM workflow.

I thought the "tools" were listed in sheet cam ?
By tools i mean material thickness and power settings from the plasa cutter ?

Yes thats the normal case but with sheetcam and plasmac, set up or import your tool set and then export it to the Plasmac Materials file using a provided script which is part of plasmac. So this way, all thet is used in sheetcam is the kerf width compensated code it generates and the tool number. You may also need to use Sheetcam code snippets but a lot of them are not required with Plasmac.

Sounds a bit backwards but it works well.

Ok,so that's easy to understand
The processor bit confused me and i got side tracked

So I have been out of the loop for a good bit. I’m getting ready to send my table information to hypertherm so thy can create the machine profile for me to run in pronest. Thy wanted me to use my current post processor to process their file. In doing so I noticed that sheetcam now has a post processor built in. Has anyone used this and if so how well does it work. I noticed it’s output is a bit different then what I’m currently getting from my tried and true post processor. Then again I’m running a really old version of plasmaC from almost a year ago.

JTknives wrote:

So I have been out of the loop for a good bit. I’m getting ready to send my table information to hypertherm so thy can create the machine profile for me to run in pronest. Thy wanted me to use my current post processor to process their file. In doing so I noticed that sheetcam now has a post processor built in. Has anyone used this and if so how well does it work. I noticed it’s output is a bit different then what I’m currently getting from my tried and true post processor. Then again I’m running a really old version of plasmaC from almost a year ago.

Can you let your Hypertherm contact know I asked their Australian Distributor (TrueCut) to ask them to build a post processor on behalf of the LinuxCNC community? I was told the request was passed on. Happy to help.

Can you post the two post processors? I know Les agreed to add a plasmac processor and he is involved with Linuxcnc so maybe he did add one. Also I think Phill has included one in later versions of Plasmac so I think output from that is the one to use as a model.

wow I really spaced this out. Here are the 2 processors with the one i have used from day one is the "plasmac - copy" and the one that comes with sheet cam is the LinuxCNC plasmaC. I was hoping there was a way that sheet cam could send all the plasma data to my table like voltage, heights and cut speed because now sheet cam has the hypertherm 45xp cut speeds built into their tool library and it would save me time from having to try and keep the material file updated on the table.

The way forward is to save your Sheetcam toolset and then import it into Plasmac with the materialverter script.
And use the latest post processor.

You may need to change your drill tool name first. Check the plasmac docs.

So I have been unaware of what's going on for a decent piece. welderstown.com/best-welders-for-beginners/ I'm preparing to send my table data to hypertherm so thy can make the machine profile for me to run in pronest.