Post Processor for LinuxCNC and PlasmaC

thefabricator03 wrote: Is it possible to turn on and off the THC from Gcode with Plasmac?

If we need to have another set of tools for THC enable and THC disabled it is going to be a nightmare to get set up.

My thought exactly. There needs to be a seperate plasmac.external-hold pin that is or'ed with the plasmac.thc-enable pin internal to the component. Then this pin could be toggled with a digital pin with M62/M63 It would be very simple to implement.

This is an interesting discussion.
As I stated earlier, I am not a cutter so I am providing what my interpretation is of what you guys want.
I am not sure what is the "correct" way of doing things is so if you think I have done something wrong then let me know and I will fix it.
To make changes though there does need to be some sort of consensus.
You also need to bear in mind that not everyone uses SheetCam and I will not tie this configuration to any particular CAM package.

Cheers, Phill.

rodw wrote:
1. could you confirm the motion.adaptive feed pin is used by reverse run?
2. Is reverse run only in use when the program is paused? eg. halui.program.is-paused is true?

Rod,
1: Yes
2. Only in the way I have connected it.

If you want to do adaptive-feed changes then you would need to unlinkp motion.adaptive-feed and then reconnect it to whatever...
Then you can use the whole range of -1 to 1 on the fly.

Cheers, Phill.

I notice that the THC has an auto mode that comes on if the tool calls for it. It would be kinda handy in my situation if, keep in mind I’m thinking out loud. Would be cool if you could tie the THC to turn off if a G02 or G03 is called out with an IJ or K exc that’s under a specified size. This way your not having to use sheetcam to mod the gcode to add thc on/off commands.

phillc54 wrote: This is an interesting discussion.
As I stated earlier, I am not a cutter so I am providing what my interpretation is of what you guys want.
I am not sure what is the "correct" way of doing things is so if you think I have done something wrong then let me know and I will fix it.
To make changes though there does need to be some sort of consensus.
You also need to bear in mind that not everyone uses SheetCam and I will not tie this configuration to any particular CAM package.

Cheers, Phill.

Phill,

I would not expect you to tie your work into one particular CAM software, That would almost be defeating the open source intentions of Linuxcnc.

As Rod has mentioned could we not just create a pin that we can call from a post processor to turn the THC on and off? That would be post processor specific and any CAM software written for Plasmac could use that feature.

JTknives wrote: I notice that the THC has an auto mode that comes on if the tool calls for it. It would be kinda handy in my situation if, keep in mind I’m thinking out loud. Would be cool if you could tie the THC to turn off if a G02 or G03 is called out with an IJ or K exc that’s under a specified size. This way your not having to use sheetcam to mod the gcode to add thc on/off commands.

An alternative:
Say your cutting a sheet and the feed-rate in the cut parameters of the run tab is 100 units
You cut a line with the gcode feed-rate of F#<_hal[plasmac.cut-feed-rate]> (which equals 100 units)
You want to cut a hole so you do that with a feed-rate less than 99% of the feed-rate in the cut parameters of the run tab
So a gcode of F 98
This never reaches 99% of the feed-rate in the cut parameters of the run tab so THC does not get enabled.

Cheers, Phill.

Edit: actually those 99% should read 99.9% so you could use F99.8