Rods "Spaceship" Scratch built Plasma Cutter build

Its been a while since I posted here. But I finally think I have QTplasmac working perfectly for me after Phill updated a new feature this morning.

I did a video  of a walkaround and tour of QTplasmac to celebrate so here  it is.



I'm really pleased that the  instability from the conversion to Python 3 has subsided now and A couple of bugfixes in QTvcp and Phill's implementation of the load last file following a suggestion I made earlier in the week have made it much easier to use.

I'd love to see a button for clear file that does the same thing as new in conversational does.
Thats another thing that just been fixed. The ability to go back to the main  tab from conversational without doing some backflips !
Phil and Greg are very responsive with bug fixes and even new features

Also a button to archive the current file and move it to another folder would be nice.

I also had a win yesterday and finally was able to get SAMBA working so I can access my home directory from Windows in the air conditioned office.
 

I think the key is to enable SMB 1.0/CIFS under Windows features. Everything about Windows you read says to disable it!

And I thought my cabinet was turning into a rats nest haha. It seems no matter how big of a cabinet you start out with (thinking "I'll never fill that"), it always runs out of room, doesn't it? :laugh:

I am adding two relays to control my coolant pump, and my air dryer, to take advantage of both the pulse-halpin button code (for timed initial filling of the table), as well as the "runcritical" code for toggle-halpin so I stop forgetting to turn on my air dryer before starting a run. At any rate, I find myself wanting to rewire the entire cabinet every time I open the door.

One last thing, if you add the following code to one of your custom hal files, you can keep your voltage display from manically flickering when your plasma cutter is on. Anything within the window (-5v to +5v in the example below) will be shown as 0 volts.

ref: linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/plasma/qtplasmac.html#_zero_window

Yeh, every time I put on the wiring channel caps I stepped over to get to the cabinet, I have to remove them to do something!
But its been pretty stable now for quite a while now I should tidy it up as I've used all if the I/O on the board or near enough!
If I did it again, I'd get rid of the massive buss bars in favour of the tiny Mesa ones and use much smaller power supplies.
I must confess the flickering numbers don't bother me as I never look at them while cutting. I'll have a look at it though. I knew it was there.

The one thing I want to try and get going is faster probing. I spent some time working on plasmac.comp yesterday but I did not nail it. That will use the toggle hal pin to enable. I want to save the material height from the last probe and dynamically modify the probe height on every pierce based on the last probe. I'm hoping I could rapid to within 3mm of the material regardless of if the material has warped above  the current probe height setting.

My drier is up high so I get into the habit of turning it on with the compressor. The auto drains make the compressor cycle so I keep it off overnight.
I actually included a power point on the control box (for downdraft) but I have never used it.

great work Rod.

I'll have to drop in and have a stickybeak at your Hal/Ini file so I can update some of the buttons on my system.

And so you can show me how you are using it efficiently.

Keen to see if you have the buttons setup to turn on/off the laser as well now (instead of that switch on the z axis).

Cheers

Any time. I am gearing up to cut a couple of full sheets down if you give me a call I can do it then. I did another video today of the cut recovery features. After I fixed the sheetcam post processor to get it working.
Then Snowgoer wanted the statistics added in so I did that too.
I also made that change he suggested a few posts ago.

Cut recovery features

The description summarises the features demonstrated.
I think the next video needs to focus on the Gcode and hole processing features.

I've actually learnt a lot about QTPlasmaC doing the videos cos I used a few things I never use.
 

Nicely done, as usual !
Thank you.