I’m looking for a software package to help me manually write G-code moves. It might help to have some background on what I’m doing as well. I’ve setup a Creality CR10 with a Luckybot food extruder - for the purpose of applying a water soluble mask to printed circuit board assemblies. The printer is still running Marlin, but I’ve disconnected the heating power and plugged a dummy thermosistor. I’ve tried using Cura 15.04 with the special Luckybot profile, but I’m having a lot of trouble getting the slicing parameters just right for the amount of extrusion needed. I finally just started giving it some manual Gcode feed lines and I’m finding that to be much more effective. Now I’ve lost the ability to quickly generate GCode (which was going to be difficult from the start, since I would have to model deposition areas with an STL file).
We have another CNC dispensing machine in the shop that has a teach wizard, where you can jog the head and add each line by physically locating the next spot. Is there an open source software that would let me do the same thing with a 3d printer running Marlin? I’ve got CNCjs and I’m able to type Gcode commands and have them execute, but I haven’t researched on how to use it beyond that.
I can see where that would be awesome for quickly flattening random sized slabs. Set start, set end, let it figure out the raster path from A—>B.
Currently, i have to measure the size, then use @jamiek gcode generator for flattening. It works great, but I end up with a single use code unless I just bite the bullet and make one that covers a larger area bigger than my planned sizes. But then I lose time cutting air when flattening smaller boards
Seems this just needs a script that stores the previous coordinate to use with the next point… and perhaps a way to toggle between g0/g1… and append formatted lines to a file. According to this page bCNC supports executing external commands from macros:
I imagine making a bash script that appends formatted lines to an nc file. A macro button is pushed, sending the current and previous positions to the script… maybe 2 buttons one fo g1 and one for g0. Aside from start/end codes, the nc file could be immediately useful. I’m not an expert on such things, but wanted to share in case anyone else might want to take it on.