Total Newbie on Taig CNC Mill!!

[vwgo]

Through recent dealings I'm now the proud new owner of a 1yr old Taig CNC Mill. The previous owner bought it and was going to do a great many things with it but never did. Now I have it at an OK bargin. To make a long story short, I was planning to go to school for cnc milling before buying one but now here I'am.

I'm learning to write G-code which seems simple enough. My problem is with the programs. It came with MPS2000 ver 2.1 and Millwizard. Other than inputting a line by line funtion using the MDI in the MPS2000 how can I write a full program and input it to the MPS2000?? It will open a .tap file but how do you make a .tap file??

Do I need to buy another program to make a .tap file??

I did download the Mach1 Mill program and I am able to write a program and save it as a .txt file that the Mach program will open and read. But now the Mach program will not talk to the taig. During the past few hours I have learned that there are a couple types of sevros and stepper motors and that they are program specific.

I have the Lamdba Series 1000DX driver that came with it. Is this good or bad? What program works best with it?? Is it better to run a DOS style program or a windows based program.

Thanks for any help you can suggest!

[Philip]

There are a couple of ways to write G-code for your mill. The easiest way is to use the notepad feature or command prompt in Windows. Simply open the command prompt, start a new file and write the code as you normally would. You can use block numbers if you wish, but they are not necessary. Then save the file with a name and a .txt file extention, or a .tap. Then load the program into MPS2000 via the #2 command and select .tap or .txt files and select the file. It will open like any other program. In regard to using Mach 1, I use Mach 2 and it works great. You will however have to configure the ports/pins for your setup. Try the Mach 1/2 users group and talk to Art. He was a tremendous help to me in getting the software configured.

Regards,
Phil

[vwgo]

Thanks for the info. I will try it.

Mark