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Sometimes Mill Stops

Discussion in 'SketchUcam Bugs' started by generalsocial, May 30, 2015.

  1. generalsocial

    generalsocial New Member

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    I use (and love) sketchucam.

    The occasional problem comes up.

    I often make complicated shapes by drawing freehand or drawing curves and lines. Occasionally sketchucam doesn't seem to work because the mill just stops while cutting. I can try and resume but nothing happens.

    I go back and replace some of the lines I made and then it works.

    There are obvious things like if there is a little curve that is smaller than the cutter radius, I just make the radius bigger.

    But sometimes they are very smooth lines.

    How to figure out what's going on?

    I loose a tone of time and material when this happens so how to avoid it or figure out it's going to happen ahead of time?
     
  2. swarfer

    swarfer Moderator Staff Member

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    We need more info:
    what version of Sketchucam?
    what machine, stepper drivers/motors etc.
    what controller (Mach3/LinuxCNC/GRBL/Tinyg/???)
    the Sketchup file and gcode you generated that stopped during processing BEFORE fixing. (welcome to give me these in a private conversation)

    are you using G61 mode, or G64? does your controller support these? for very short segments you should try G64 mode, ie turn 'use exact path' off in Sketchucam and set G64 (and the P parameter if your controller supports it) before starting the job.
    (hit the big blue question mark to get the help, then 'change default options' in the righthand menu, then 'feature options')
    http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/gcode/gcode.html#sec:G61-G61_1

    My initial reaction is that a stepper driver is overheating, next up is the controller being 'confused' by very short arc segments (because of the nature of arctan calculations).
    Solution for that is to explode the arcs before adding cut lines so that all Gcode is straight line segments, ie contains no G03 or G02 codes.
     

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