Hello all, newbie here. Having recently completed a c-beam xl build, which is running a cnc shield , grbl 09j, dq542 drivers and bcnc on a pc running win7pro. The issue I am having and need help understanding is setting up a job.I have created just a simple job of cutting a pocket in a work piece using Fusion 360 then bring the job into bcnc. Perform a homing operation then work 0 routine on all axes. Run the job, the first thing that happens is the head returns to the home position or says soft limit error.(moves to a + X direction instead of a -X) I have zeroed to the centre of my table. If the same file is used in Chilipeper it runs without issues. I have tried to look at the wiki in bcnc but can not find a real good explanation of the WPOS button. I am at a loss and would appreciate any help here.Perhaps missed a step in the understanding of how it is supposed to work. A point of observation I ran the shapeoko calibration pattern file in CP it ran but all the text was mirrored, it would not run in Bcnc. Sorry for the long winded question.
I don't know bcnc but I had the same on a 3d printer, Sounds like your homing in the wrong direction hence the backwards text
G'Day @busybuilder, I've got a different setup - Fusion 360, raspberry Pi, smoothieboard, Bcnc; but I will try to help anyway with limited knowledge. First thing to check- are your stepper motors moving in the right direction. Move everything manually to the centre before powering up. Start Bcnc and in the Control Tab, jog a short distance + 5mm in X (should move 5mm to your right when facing the front of the machine) jog Y+ 5mm (the table should move 5mm towards you) jog Z + 5mm (Z should go up 5mm). Have you got limit switches (end stops) on your build that work? I don't think Bcnc does soft limits yet and only shows where you work area is on screen, but I could be wrong and I'm easily confused. Test your Limit switches are working with a "M119" command in the terminal by clicking in and typing in "M119" in command box. Get a helper if you can't reach and hold down a endstop trigger for example the Z max endstop, then press enter for the result. Note that I've setup Z home in smoothie to Zmax and the others are Ymin and Xmin... But could change this by hard wiring the bottom endstop on my board to Zmin, if that makes sense. You'll get a result something like this. Showing that the Zmax endstop was triggered (1). Repeat the above for your other endstops. To make sure they work as expected and are in the right locations as far as your machine thinks. Here's a picture showing where your MPos zero (machine) is after "Homing" to your endstops is roughly on my machine and where the WPos zero (Work) is (in this case top, front left corner. You zero your Y,Xand Z to WPos before starting a job but after the machine is homed. Now lets make what is seen on the Bcnc workspace look the way it should for my brain to understand. Go into "Tools" and change the machine parameters to what's in the box for a standard C-Beam Machine XLarge. By clicking in the relevant box and typing in the values, (minus) -730 for Travel x, -320 for y & -40 for z. So the workspace looks like the below after saving. Click "Machine" to save your changes to the config file; then exit Bcnc and reopen to check that it has stuck. Hoped that helps a little. Let us know...
Adam,thanks a million . The workspace was the issue I was not able to get my head around and how to set it up .Will give it a go today and let you know, but already this has been helpful as i could not find any manual to do this.
Adam, thanks that really gave me an education on the setup. The M119 command returned as unrecognized however I just jogged to get the travel distance and input those into the terminal. I do have one more quirk that came up, all this time I was testing the system with my laptop and the setup worked fine (minus the issues fore mentioned) then I loaded up Bcnc on the actual PC that will be attached to the router and did a home function but quickly noticed that on my dual motor y travel they were opposite to each other. Plugged in the laptop again and jog direction was fine. My question would be is there some kind of mirror or duplicate the Y axsis onto A that I did not check off in some line of code? Also noticed GUI differences in Raspi and PC.
