Greetings; I am in the middle of roughing out a bit of code that would help me in laying out the pocket to hold a piece of PCB material for mechanical etching, with the pocket carved in a sheet of micarta I get in 1/2" thickness from Highland Hdwe in Hotlanta.
A common feature of all those I have made so far, has been a short piece of model makers brass tubing, 1/8" OD, set into the top, and used for mill auto zeroing in the X-Y plane by use of a routine I wrote that makes heavy use of the G38.2 canned code. This seems to get me a repeatability in the 2 thou or less range, which seems adequate for carving dbl sided PCB's. However, it seems pcb-gcode enumerates the tool numbers, so unless I edit its output after checking the tool table to see where I might have a .125 diameter end mill defined, I am doomed to doing ALL the tool radius compensations in my code. This of coarse is my problem, but its background to a bit of confusion too, because the axis backplot shows the span of the codes total motion, without any tool comp, so the output is, for me, incorrect. So, by the time we get to 3.0, would it be possible to have axis connected to an "M" macro that would draw a pink box based on the 4 parameters specified? And measure that box, reporting it as the codes span? By that method, I could see in the backplot, both the outline of the pocket I am carving and outside of that box, a tool sized pink dot wherever I dropped an eighth inch endmill in to serve as the boards corner clearance and to show outside edge pocket that a 0-80 flathead screw, used as a board hold down could all be visualized? That is set currently at .033" farther out than the corner clearance at the corners is. This opens the possibility of doing it several times in one file to better track things, and would hopefully allow me to skip carving a block of leftover hardwood flooring to verify my work before committing it to the more ex$pen$ive micarta. Could this feature like this get any traction? Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://gene.homelinux.net:6309/gene> should be up! Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world. -- The Beach Boys A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LIMITED TIME SALE - Full Year of Microsoft Training For Just $49.99! 1,500+ hours of tutorials including VisualStudio 2012, Windows 8, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, MVC 4, more. BEST VALUE: New Multi-Library Power Pack includes Mobile, Cloud, Java, and UX Design. Lowest price ever! Ends 9/20/13. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58041151&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
