Hi all
I've been using CamBam for a while now, for the most part successfully but not without some odd glitches. I'm making a simulator cockpit, mainly using MDF, plywood and acrylic, and CamBam is used in conjunction with one of those Chines clone 3040 CNC routers and a smaller 3018 CNC router. I would have posted here before but for some reason had issues gaining access to the forum, happily that has been resolved.
I am aware that the CNC boards on those Chinese machines can give issues, however there are times when I have produced .nc files with CamBam using either .dxf files from Qcad or .stl files from Solidworks where there have been odd glitches in the .nc that are repeatable, therefore appear to be within the code itself.
A good example is where I had a series of holes to be drilled all to the same depth on a flat (2D) part. A lot of the holes will be fine, then it gets to a particular one and does not lift before traversing to the next hole, either machining a groove in the part or snapping the cutter. Attempts to repeat it will have exactly the same result, so as I said it is repeatable.
Yesterday I was doing some 3D machining to gain experience prior to attempting some more advanced parts. I had three goes at producing the code, and each one had a repeatable error, one that was irritating but still allowed the part to be produced successfully, but two times ruining the part. On the 'successful' version, when cutting out a rectangular pocket that required 8 or so successive depth cuts, it would get about halfway through the cut, then perform a bizarre set of movements with it cutting across the corners of the cut, returning, jinking back and forth a few times, then going about halfway across the diagonal cut and then slowing to a crawl until reaching a certain point, then continuing with the rest of the cut as if nothing had happened. It did this on every pass.
With the two unsuccessful versions, one had it traverse to the next cut without lifting, so cutting the part in two, and the other had it inventing some cuts on a part of the component that bore no relation to anything. When it happened the movement was very jerky and violent, as if there were conflicting instructions being sent to the motors. Note that after each unsuccessful attempt I had CamBam regenerate the code, but did 'air cuts' to see if the faults would replicate, which they did
Is this a recognised issue? If so is there anything that I can do to reduce the chances of these errors? My 'simple' test piece had over 9500 lines of code, so there is no way I could plough through all that to check.
Any guidance on this would be gratefully received
Cheers
Les
