hi there, I'm new to cnc, and was thinking of making a machine (checking out all the useful info on this forum), but then a small job came up that meant it would be useful to get one straight away, so I bought a Gerber AR400 off ebay (4x4 foot bed). It came with Gerber's own software (Composer and Artpath), which does 2D stuff fine (I'm just learning, and it seems capable of most 2D work I'd need to do, and simple to use- I was cutting within an hour of plugging it in, and that included the software install..)
However, I'd like to do some relief work, but it seems that Gerber's older routers use their own proprietary code (not g-code), so many of the common (and cheap!) CAM packages won't drive them. I read somewhere that Artcam might, and I'm waiting to hear back from them about it. It seems to run its code through the Gerber Spooler (?) before it gets to the router. But it's probably too expensive for the amount of work I'd do with it.
I'm sure my machine is capable of 3D (it's just a stepper motor, after all), so I'm hoping someone on this forum might have experience of driving an older Gerber from some other CAM software.
Otherwise, I thought I could make a new CNC controller, and retro-fit. (I was even thinking of using a bank of solid-state switches to toggle the steppers between the Gerber controller and a new one, so I could still use the Gerber software while I was getting the retro-fit to work properly.
Any advice would be appreciated.
steve