Hi Guys, Loving the simple CONTROL CAM for my plasma cutter, I am starting to tweak the settings to make it work a little quicker and more efficiently but ideally need a pause before cutting the shapes so the arc has more chance of initiating. Is this possible? I can do this on SheetCAM but haven't bought the software so am limited on the number of lines possible, unless there is other software that's free or cost effective? Cheers Will
In CAM -> Settings > 6 Advanced > Plasma Initial Height Sensing Gcode we can hack in some extra commands: M3 S1000 ; turn plasma on G4 P0.5; G4 = dwell, pausing in place for P0.5 = 0.5 seconds, change 0.5 to however long you want to pause in place (this will have two M3S1000s in the gcode but the second one will be ignored by Grbl so all good)
Its supposed to ... I use if for actual height sensing on my floating head with: When you look at the gcode output is the extra commands not present? If you could check for me, I havent actually used the Plasma in a while so let me know if its not and I'll dig in then
Oh, and since not all machines have/need IHS and we are hacking IHS for your use case: Remember to enable IHS (Initial Height Sensing) in the Operation too
Perfect thanks, I will try selecting the IHS later but looking at the G code it looks like that was the issue here, thanks again!
So this worked perfectly! I have one more question if i may... my g code calls for z to be -.1000 even though i tell the CAM to be 2mm above. is there something i should be checking here?
Going to need the workspace export to check The OBC files allow me to see what the backend is doing with the settings, best to always include it
That is a little "bug": Laser/Plasma operations all have a -0.1 Z start position at this time, in practise you shouldn't notice that little, but its a bug in the toolpath worker where Z=0 doesnt render the preview correctly, so we threw in a hardcoded 0.1 for a workaround. I've logged it as a bug again and will work on it when I get a change (won't be for the next two weeks or so, sorry): Plasma/Vector hardcoded Z-0.1 bug · Issue #59 · OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CAM
Ahh thanks Peter, the work around is to find and replace the code with z1.5 or so, so its no actual issue for the time being but awesome once cracked
