I have a little question if you guys don’t mind answering, A friend has bought a couple of CNC machines, 1 standard milling the other a spindle machine his problem is he is struggling to understand the mach3 software so I was wondering if he could use LW/CNC to create the job/g code from his design and import it into Mach3 until we get round to going over to a smoothie based board?
Not sure what Mach3 needs in terms of gcode but try and do simples shapes in the air and see how it goes.
@Ariel_Yahni_UniKpty that’s what I thought but didn’t want to say it because it’s not my machine of anything goes wrong.
If that does not work he can always sell it to one of us and we will do simple shapes in the air…
He will be looking to sell one but being in the uk I’m not sure what shipping charges it would incur.
Mach3 should work with most of the gcode we produce. Just make sure to configure tool on to M3 and tool off to M5. And probably some config in the start gcode, like G21 (mm), G90 (absolute coords) and G17 (x/y plane).
@cprezzi thank you, I understand the M03-05 fit start stop but the G21-G90 etc should that be set to the overall bed cutting size like G21,2400, G90,1200 and G150 if the spindle height travel is about 6".
Sorry I know absolute Jack about CNC and only going on what I’ve learnt using LW on my K40.
@Andy_Shilling No, in GCODE START you shoud only set “G21 G90 G17”. This tells Mach3 to use mm, absolute coordinates and the x/y plane.
In TOOL ON you should set “M3” and in TOOL OFF set “M5”.
The machine limits are configured via Mach3 and don’t need to be in the gcode.
If you want that the LW4 workspace represents the maschine dimensions, then configure setings/machine in LW4 accordingly, but thats not important for the gcode generation.
@cprezzi Thank you very much that makes sense now. I’ll adjust that now and send the files over to him to try.
Thank you again.