Sheetcam and trying to generate spotting gcode.

I think its been raised by people who didn't really understand why it had to work the way it does.
It will be interesting to see Les's response.

phillc54 wrote:

Well I am happy to remove the PP and leave it to others, it was only provided as a convenience and I don't have the time to maintain it.

I don't think it needs any maintenance right now. The Plasmac feature set is now pretty stable so the PP you've done works well. If it didn't I would have edited it to suit my needs.

phillc54 wrote:

Well I am happy to remove the PP and leave it to others, it was only provided as a convenience and I don't have the time to maintain it.

I think I will take this as an invitation to Les to join this thread.

Others here are more qualified to answer his questions.

I also use the spotting function quite often and do it like this:
1. Move holes to a new layer
2. Use a drill operation and select the "Center Mark" material to spot at the same height.
And if someone uses RS485, the selected material will set all the parameters for spotting.

rodw wrote:

I personally don't see why spotting can't stay the same as it is on spindle #2 with the current tool names and spindle #3 is used for a real drill so it could all coexist with a minor change to the post processor.

+1

Rodw pointed me to this thread.

To me it is unintuitive to expect a drill operation to be a plasma centre spot.
IMHO the drill operation should be removed as a centre spot option and kept for a drill spindle down the track.

As far as SheetCam is concerned, for spotting you are using a center drill that happens to be a plasma cutter.
You can still use drilling with a drill tool if you want to use a drill spindle (assuming the post is set up for it)

I'll go through the post and see what I can come up with. One thing I see straight away is that the centre spot tool is using spindle 2. Should this not be spindle 0 as spindle 0 is the plasma tool?

Another spindle question - What are the spindles actually used for? At first I assumed they were used to select offsets but looking at the manual I see you need to use tool offsets as well.

phillc54 wrote:

I don't see what is wrong with it either but it seems others do. Or am I confused?

To guarantee the expected results the user has to both change tools and use a drilling operation. This leads to confusion since expected results can accidentally be achieved by do one or the other and not both. This was not obvious to either OP or me at least.

If Les could make the *next* toolName and toolClass variables available to the OnNewOperation event I'm thinking these issues could be easily remedied by just moving much of the OnToolChange code to the OnNewOperation event. Presumably OnNewOperation gets called on each new operation, whereas we've utilized the OnToolChange and does not necessarily get called on each new operation.

To guarantee the expected results the user has to both change tools and use a drilling operation. This leads to confusion since expected results can accidentally be achieved by do one or the other and not both. This was not obvious to either OP or me at least.

Yes, that is a bug in the post. I'm working on an updated post that fixes this issue among others. You will be able to use a drilling operation for spotting with any plasma tool. The post will no longer depend on the tool name.