[xxtoni]

Greetings,

After a few daunting days finally managed to get controls on my mill from some crappy DOS software that wouldn't run properly under XP to Mach3.

It works really well, I just have one problem - machine zero coordinates.

My machine doesn't have home or zero switches so I want to utilize the soft limits. The way I did it today was by jogging the machine to where I wanted to have the zeros manually and just clicking on "Ref all home" then I would just setup the soft limits by jogging onto all of the edges and entering those coordinates into the soft limits. This worked beautifully (especially since I had no kinds of limits whatsoever in the former software, you can only imagine the horror).

Anyway the problem is that when I want to work on something and I import a job into Mach3 and then jog the head into the middle of the table for example and to mark from where the routing should start I have to click "reff all home" again. As you probably can imagine by now, this cancels out my previous zero, the one I want to act as machine zero and uses the new location as both machine zero and the zero for the milling of the new file I imported.

So basically my question here is - is there some way to set a permanent machine zero without home switches. The way I did it works nicely so I'm just looking for a way to make it "stick".

Thanks in advance!

[ger21]

Anyway the problem is that when I want to work on something and I import a job into Mach3 and then jog the head into the middle of the table for example and to mark from where the routing should start I have to click "reff all home" again.

You don't want to Ref All here. What you want is to zero the work coordinates, which are the coordinates you'll actually be using when the g-code is running. What this does is set work offsets, so that your Machine Coordinates remain persistent. One thing you'll want to do is go to General Config and check the "Persistent DRO's" check box in the lower right corner.

Over time, though, your machine coordinates can drift slightly, as steppers will move slightly when powering up and down. So you'll occasionally want to jog to a repeatable location to reset your machine coordinates every now and then.

[xxtoni]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply.

I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you mean but I'm sure that once I try it out on the machine itself that it will be clearer.

I'll try what you suggested and see if that works and reply as soon as possible.

Thanks again!

[ger21]

Machine coordinates should never change.
When you run your parts, you are working in work coordinates, or work offsets. By zeroing the work coordinates (button to the left of each DRO), you are setting a work offset. This allows you to use a diferent coordinate system each time you use the machine, and the Machine coordinates never change.

You might want to watch the "Homing, Limits and Offsets" video here.
ArtSoft USA - Video Tutorials

[xxtoni]

Machine coordinates should never change.
When you run your parts, you are working in work coordinates, or work offsets. By zeroing the work coordinates (button to the left of each DRO), you are setting a work offset. This allows you to use a diferent coordinate system each time you use the machine, and the Machine coordinates never change.

You might want to watch the "Homing, Limits and Offsets" video here.
ArtSoft USA - Video Tutorials

Just got into the company and tried what you suggested, it worked perfectly! So thanks a million for that.

There are only two things left that I can't figure out and if you could help with that as well I'd be eternally grateful!

Setting up tools

Just can't wrap my head around this one.

In the software I used before I would set the Z a bit above the material I want to cut, just enough so it doesn't touch the material and I had an option in the tool table called Depth, there I'd just input how deep I want the tool to be lowered, after the cut was done or a line and the tool needed to be brought up from the material it would return it to the Z above the material I previously set (hope that makes sense).

I've watched all of the tutorial videos, half a dozen Mach3 tool videos on youtube and read pretty much anything I could find on cnczone and the mach3 support forum but I just can't wrap my head around how to setup the tools in Mach3.

A nudge in the right direction would be really helpful


Corel Draw/Illustrator to G-code

We are a signage company so our main tool is Adobe Illustrator and that's how we've exported our files for routing so far.

When I setup Mach3 I found out that unlike the previous software we used, where I could just import a .plt file and that would take care of all the g-code stuff, with Mach3 I need a middle man between itself and Illustrator, something to concert the vectors to g-code.

I've tried downloading a few tools like SheetCam to get this done but to no avail. I thought it would be as simple a process as: import file into SheetCam, export it in G-code but when I tried doing it like that I just got an empty file when I imported the g-code into Mach3 so I'm probably missing something along the way.


You've been an incredible help, thanks for lot!