Want to use DeskProto in place of DeskCNC for CAM

[SCMW]

Greetings,

I have been experiencing difficulties and admittedly, some frustration using DeskCNC to create some of my parts that were designed with Rhino. As a control, I took several .stl's that I saved in Rhino to a friend who has the same mill and is running DeskProto. The parts came out fine and we did not have to do anything special to get the parts cut.

I am in the midst of a large job and do not have the luxury of time to learn something that might or might not do it fast enough. As such, I have to look to other means to get the work done quickly and bring this project back on schedule.

As a test, I have downloaded DeskProto to my system. I have several questions that I hope the answers will help me to accomplish that which I'm trying to do.

1.) What settings if any, do I need to make or change to DeskCNC and the System-3A 4 axis controller in order to use DeskProto for my CAM functions?

2.) Will there be any other changes that I need to perform in order for this to work?

3.) What caveats are there if any, to using DeskProto or Visual Mill for that matter with the IMService system?

4.) Will I need to make any hardware changes?

5.) Are there any other considerations or issues to be wary of when using DeskProto or any other CAM software with the IMService System-3A 4 axis controller?

Thanks,
SC

[greasetattoo]

If your controller is from IMservice, I believe the only thing you can run is DeskCNC.
I may be wrong, though.


I am using DeskCNC with no problems at all!

[creasyts]

That software must generate G code compatible with DeskCNC. You can manually write the g-code, for example--that software is in your head.

The imsrv.com web site has a good reference to the compatible g-code at this link:

http://www.imsrv.com/deskcnc/

Scroll down to DeskCNC documentation--that appears at the left hand side--and click on G-code Syntax. You'll get a PDF reference file.

How do you edit your post-processor to write compatible code? That is beyond me. I have not done that yet.

I have used WORD and EXCEL to edit old g-code files into DeskCNC compatible files. The differences were small and I could write EXCEL macros to find and change things consistently.

But yes, at the end you'll use DeskCNC to send the commands to your machine.

Try it out on some scrap first!