Programming a Pentacon 2-axis laser

Without looking on Google, does your control take standard g-code, or something else? If so, perhaps your part is simple enough to manually program?

Regards,

Robin

If its just g code programing send me a drawing and tell me the dia. of the laser cut and witch side of the line to cut.Also here are some other cnc links.

?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.machines.cnchttp://www.mmsonline.com/dp/forums/forum_results.cfm?t_id=2431&pub=MMS&f_id=98&m_id=5958#5958http://www.mmsonline.com/dp/forums/index.cfm?pub=MMS

(see .sig)

Tim

Guys, thanks for the helpful suggestions. Yes, it is basically G-code programming but we're a little short on the documentation...we don't have the instructions on how do do stuff like calling hole subroutines. We've got some sample programs that were apparently computer generated and the holes are drilled in four quarter-turn steps with absolute co-ordinates...surely you don't have to do it that way when you're coding by hand?? Yes, it's quite a simple part we're doing, and we could probably get it programmed ourselves but we really wouldn't mind hooking up with someone familiar with out Pentacon laser who knows how to do the nesting, layout, etc; even leaving those break-off tabs so the part doesnt drop out of the sheet. I'm going away on holidays at the end of next week and I was hoping to leave the guys with something they could start putting into production, even if its not optimised. Bear with me until Monday and I'll try to collect all my info including a part drawing...

Marty Green Winnipeg, Canada snipped-for-privacy@aptitude-testing.com

I do not think it matters what computer you have .It just needs to know what path to take do you have a sample program? Any cad program can do that

It depends on the machine. Quite a few of the older ones, at least, had both G02 and G03 (CW and CCW) limited to single quadrants, so to cross a quadrant boundary, you need to generate multiple calls.

However, some systems so restricted may have "canned cycles" which will hide the multiple calls behind a single instruction.

I don't know your machine, so I don't know what it has as its limitations and capabilities, but yes, some do have that limitation.

However, the computer-generated code may be set up to generate the four individual quadrants to simplify programming for *all* machines, and yours may really have the ability to handle multi-quadrant programs. I guess that you will simply have to try it and see what happens (obviously, with an unimportant part.)

Good Luck, DoN.

Thanks, Don. I think we've solved the problem; Tuesday I got down and started programming the part with nothing but G1, G2, and G3 commands, because that was all I had the examples for. It was a bugger to figure out the i and j coordinates for the centers every time I wanted to do a fillet, but I got them. The next day we got our long-awaited progamming manual and I saw that there were macro commands for fillets and all kinds of things, even French curves through a given set of points.

I think what happened is the sample programs were all computer-generated from CAD drawings and they just used the most basic commands. So following those examples I basically did it the hard way.

Marty