RS485 For Hypertherms

tommylight wrote:

Yes it is, and it is not height sensitive as plasma.
Adding big buttons for up/down while cutting would be useful.
Basically it is:
-Fire the torch ( acetylene or propane with some oxygen )
-Press run on Linuxcnc
-Wait for the set amount in gcode or panel
-Turn on the relay or the valve for the cutting oxygen
-Engage motion.

Tom,

Does a gantry oxy set use a special set of tips? I know as a fabricator how much difference it makes for your oxy cut to have a nice clean tip. How does they gantry oxy keep its tips clean? Using tip cleaners at the beginning of every cutting session?

rodw wrote:

Which brings me to a thought. Linuxnc's multispindle functionality makes it so darn easy to add additional tools but we started numbering them in a fixed fashion in Plasmac. I think the development team (who is that now?) should think about adding some sort of spindle type to the configuration. So somebody who wants a drill and not a scribe can specify its on spindle 1 and so on. Adding that flexibility that now might save Plasmac from the kind of confusion the joint axis feature has brought (That one has yet to play out. Wait until 2.8 becomes the release version and 2.7 users upgrade...)

Rod,
I'm not 100% sure where you are heading here.
It has been bugging me a bit too. When I started I didn't think beyond one spindle then when we added the air-scribe I thought that would be it, but...
I would love to hear more.

Phill, I don't really know. But I kinda think the plasma is 0, the spotting is 1 as its plasma so its always there and then a user might want to add scribe, air drill, mechanised drill, router, oxy just to name a few. I saw a machine the other day with a BT40 spindle for drilling complete with a material clamp. but somewhere Plasmac needs to set some limits. BUt it would not make sense to add 5 spindles and only use 0, 1 and 4.

I was thinking it was more of a configuration thing rather than internal changes.

Anyway pass my feed back on to your development team
Oh wait, no need for that, they have all been updated!

It's hard to know what to do.
Flexibility in spindle numbering would be nice in that a user could have consecutively numbered spindles but would make GCode not portable between configurations.

Rod,

How do you think a BT40 spindle would go in a plasma environment? Being dirty and dusty and or wet would cause damage to the components?

I guess thats where Phils idea of multiple X axies would come into play, you could make a long x axis and tuck it out of the way while cutting.

thefabricator03 wrote:

I guess thats where Phils idea of multiple X axies would come into play, you could make a long x axis and tuck it out of the way while cutting.

Oops, I meant multiple Z axes.

Um, the BT40 was a $20k addon from memory....

Phill, is it necessary to have portability between plasmac installations?
Portability is just a requirement for a machine integrator like Stefan I would have thought. But what you say is not something I had thought about

I am not sure, only if folk require portable GCode.
My main concerns with any changes are backwards compatibility and not breaking previous configs.

phillc54 wrote:

I am not sure, only if folk require portable GCode.
My main concerns with any changes are backwards compatibility and not breaking previous configs.

I thought you took great delight in breaking configs but now I know that treatment is just reserved for me!

rodw wrote:

I thought you took great delight in breaking configs but now I know that treatment is just reserved for me!

Yes, going by the number of times that has happened anyone would think that I enjoy it.