What CNC Book can you recommend?

[avayan]

I have been toying with CNC for well over a year now, but most of my endeavors have been by using CAM software which basically generates all the G Code I need to do the part in question. I did learn a little bit of basic G Codes such as G0 and G1 to do some manual stuff, but most of my operations have been with the computer controls or the controller interpreting the CAM generated G Code.

I think I have come to the point where I want to actually learn all this G Code. My final intention is to code my own G Code interpreter on a conventional microcontroller as I want to build other CNC machines myself. Instead of using MACH3, EMC or a canned G Code controller, I want to do my own G Code interpreter by coding a microcontroller in C. I have been doing motion control development for the past few 12 years, so all I need is a little bit of a reference to make sure I code the G Codes correctly.

I went to Amazon and saw a bunch of books on the G Code subject, but it seems the show me how to use the available g Codes to manually program the cutting of a resulting piece. Although all of this is good information, I am also interested in a book that can steer me into what would it take to understand the algorithms being executed as any given G Code is interpreted. Is there such a book or resource out there?

Thanks for any pointer you may provide!

[Al_The_Man]

CNC programming Handbook by peter Smid is one of the bibles.
Also there is a free simulator CNCsimulator.com.
http://www.cncsimulator.com/
For mathematical algorithms etc there is Computer Numerical Control Programming by Michael Sava and Joseph Pusztai.
Al.

[fordav11]

The CNCSimulator is a great program. I've been using it for years.
But it's a little annoying that it expires for no reason and has to have the 'petrol tank' filled up again. It's total B.S. Most of the time the petrol thing doesn't even work. If you look on their forum there are hundreds of people saying the same thing. If you can't fill up the tank it won't work at all and can't even be re-installed from scratch because they check things and don't allow it to run once the petrol has run out.

If anyone is interested I figured out how to keep it going without doing the petrol B.S.

I can post the info here if anyone is interested......

[Al_The_Man]

Originally Posted by fordav11 If anyone is interested I figured out how to keep it going without doing the petrol B.S. I can post the info here if anyone is interested......

That would be handy!!
Al.

[doorknob]

While it may not be exactly what you asked for, since EMC/LinuxCNC is open source, you might find that studying the source code will illuminate the subject.

[fordav11]

Originally Posted by Al_The_Man That would be handy!! Al.

hehe! I thought there would be interest.
It's a huge pain when it's running on a machine that doesn't have internet access like an old laptop off-site at another location.

If you delete the entire directory and re-install it still won't run.
Basically they leave some hidden stuff in the registry.
When it's uninstalled that stuff is still there. Even if the registry info is deleted it still won't run because when the petrol runs out they stealthily dirty some of the files so it won't run without a new petrol file regardless.
I couldn't be bothered to figure out what files exactly are modified since a delete and re-install via batch file takes just a few seconds.

See attached .bat and .reg (zipped)
Run the .bat it will delete the files then run the .reg and kill the registry stuff. If you put cncsetup453.exe in the same dir it'll re-install it for you. The tool files remain untouched.

.bat file contents....
del "C:\Program Files\CncSimulator\*.*" /q
cnc_uninstall.reg
cncsetup453.exe

.reg file contents....
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ChMts]
"msCheck"=dword:00000002


The minus before HKEY removes the entry. You can double-click the .reg to remove it manually.

Note that once this gets out they will probably change it and release a new version (typical cat and mouse game software companies play with hackers) so get the current version 4.53f now and keep it handy
The file is cncsetup453.exe , 3.92 MB (4,114,451 bytes)

Looks like they are working on a pro version now. Something I look forward to cracking in the future. Or maybe they will come to their senses and realize that CNC machines don't run on petrol. Hmmmm.



Enjoy