Sheetcam

I would like to set up the post processed for sheetcam. I plan on using  thcad-10 with a mesa 7i76e board. With a hypertherm45

There is one included with sheetcam,

I thought we had to do a whole plasmac thing?

Is the one included in sheet cam set up for the communication between the thcad-10 and the Mesa 7i76e board? Last time I believe I have to deal with plasmac

how do the Mesa and thcad-10 communicate? They are wired to one another, though is it through the simple wiring that the thcad-10 tells the Mesa to raise and lower the x axis?

I though at least the post processor for sheetcam had to be set to remove x axis information in order to clear the way for thcad-10 control?

The THC communicates with the Mesa controller. The Mesa control uses the info from the THC to maintain a Z torch height.

The torch height is determined by a value you pass to the Mesa through Sheetcam. Then LinuxCNC passes that value to the Mesa which handles the Z axis torch height.


I'm not sure how you set the value in SheetCam because i use a stand alone THC where you set the height with a knob.

I do use SheetCam on a router, a mini mill and my plasma and it's an excellent program. 

Hope this helps..





How you do that I do not know

the THCAD is a voltage to frequency converter. This resulting frequency read by an encoder input is scaled in linuxcnc to represent a voltage
Sheetcam has a materials library for plasma that lets you define the cut charts for the mateials you cut. this library included all of the setting parameters required.

QTplasmac also has a materials library. You can save your .tools in sheetcam and import them into QTplasmac. Entering data is probably easier in Sheetcam.

At the top of the sheetcam provided post processor, there are some variables that can be chnaged to deterimine where the cut parameters are taken from  (from Sheetcam or QTplasmac) If QTplasmac is chosen as the master,  all Sheetcam sends is the tool number and the rest of the data is retrived from the QTplasmac for that tool.

If Sheetcam is chosen as the master, all the cut parameters are passed to QTplasmac in a "magic comment" and saved to a temporary material.

Regardless of the method sheetcam uses, QTplasmac should have a copy of the tools so you canuse the conversational settings.
 

Okay. I would like it to use the toolset I have in sheetcam. I think there’s a place that has a bunch of tools already set for the hypertherm45xp and I’ll download that. So I should copy that to qtplasmac? I haven’t downloaded qtplasmac yet, do I have to do that? Along with that what sort of configuration do I need to do for qtplasmac

Time to read the QTP manual.
Download and install your tools into Sheetcam first. Then follow the steps I stated.