Hi. I'm new to this site. I recently bought a "3040 4-axis mill". It's my first CNC mill. Ive spent the last two months in Corona lockdown tuning it up, adding limit switches, getting familiar with the Mach 3 SW, and finally cutting a part. Im happy with the resulting part (picture attached), but had a few things I'm looking for some help on.
The biggest issue I had was that in the middle of my finishing pass, the mill stopped moving, with no indication (that I could find in MAch3) of why. This had happened before on my first trial run. I stopped the spindle, returned the mill to coordinates 0,0,0 using manual gcodes, then edited the gcode file that was being run. I deleted all the steps that had been executed, loaded the remainder of the file in Mach 3, returned the spindle to the location it was in when it stopped, and started execution. It completed the rest of the job. Any idea why this should happen? I looked for Mach3 forum on this site, but found none.
My second question is about the control board in this mill. It appears to be the "latest" version. It has a direct USB connection, and ARM processor on the board, and all the stepper drivers are integrated into the board. I'm interested in learning more about this board. With an ARM processor, I assume it could run some CNC code directly, and not use Mach3 (which seems like it's a bit out of date). I don;t know the details of the board, but I found the same one on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/100Khz-Breako.../dp/B07RHPVHYW Are there forums on this site that get into this kind of stuff someone could guide me to?
Thanks- Mike