Hi all,
Long-time lurker here, first time posting.
For those of you who don't feel like reading (and subsequently labeling me as a whiner): If you have a good, simple software workflow I'd love to know about it.
I need help! Two years ago, I built a CNC router based off of the Momus designs. If you're curious, I made almost zero modifications from the original design with one exception: before I put down the bed of the machine, I put an array of tee nuts facing upwards. When I did the epoxy pass I made sure to have bolts in those nuts so that the holes were not plugged up by the epoxy. My idea was to have a way to secure things to the floor of the machine without having to screw into the bed.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I need help finding good software to use with the machine. When I built the machine, I was so excited to build something with my hands that I worked on it between 5 and 7 days a week, sometimes late into the night. I've never done any kind of machining or metal work before (but am quite handy around the house), and this was so much fun to build.
...then came the software. I'm a software engineer by profession, I've been working on and with software for 30 years now. That being said, every time I think about firing up my machine I think to myself that I'd probably rather stab my eyes out than sit in front of a PC to work with that toolchain again. The problem is that each tool I used has its own steep learning curve, and I could picture a profession based around each one of them -- first designing, then creating the tool path, then finally driving the machine. What I used is:
AutoCAD
MasterCAM
Mach3
I could never find a good way to configure MasterCAM for my machine. That would result in gcode that would either run way too fast or way too slow. I tried milling both wood and aluminum, and it took a while to get things to work even half well, and when I did, I felt like I was forcing in numbers where I expect much of this should be presets in that tool.
Mach3 is also an antiquated interface. Granted, it does the job, more or less, but there are tricks and tweaks that are necessary.
So after dropping a pretty penny building my machine, what I have built with it?
1. Some test gcodes I wrote by hand. Arrays of points, circles, and a skull.
2. A toy sword for my kids. Handle was fatter than I wanted it to be. I'm such a bad dad that I never redesigned it for them and printed new ones though it would have probably taken minutes. Now either the mill was too slow or the router was too fast, but that wood was smoking as it was being cut -- so the edges all have a nice, burnt smell.
3. I milled new brackets for my router. Hand cutting the router mount for the momus build was the biggest challenge for me, and getting a nice curved surface was not really happening well. Rather than having a couple of nice smooth clamps attached to the router body, since it's a little jagged it probably is applying pressure on a few points only.
...and that's all. I could never motivate myself to learn the software better. It was all tricky and counter-intuitive (though I imagine once you master those tools you can work magic), that I dreaded the thought of touching it again. Even those router mounts (that had a small amount of chatter but otherwise were awesome compared to the ones I hand crafted) never even made it on my build! That's how turned off I got by the whole software process!
So here I appeal to my fellow Momus CNC builders -- please help this sad (and honestly somewhat pathetic) dude get back into using his router. It's a good, solid build. I just need a simple software workflow that works rather well with the momus and I'll be all set. For those of you using Momus, what toolchain do you use? How did you configure it?
Thanks in advance,
Sauce
Oh, and I thought I'd share some photos from my build:
First, here's the underside of the bed showing the array of tee nuts I embedded into it so I could bolt things down
Here's the finished enclosure. Like my color choices?
Here's the gantry installed:
And finally, here's the router mounted with my hand made brackets