I haven’t gotten my machine fired up yet to cut, but I have a question. I’m using this for cnc and vinyl cutting only, and want to know how do I get the starting z height correct?
I’m coming from 3D printing, so I just want to wrap my head around it. I’ve seen some CNC’s have a little pad that the tool touches before starting the G code, is that something that is available to the MPCNC project?
If not, do I just manually set the Z height with estlcam, and the machine does the rest?
Easiest way is just set it by hand. You can certainly use a zprobe/touchpad, but really by hand is simple.
EstlCAM does not control the machine (yet), the LCD or REpetier host does. Estlcam is just for creating paths, like a slicer.
Gotcha. Thanks!
EstlCAM does not control the machine (yet)
?
He means that EstlCAM is only used for generating the toolpaths, as in, where the machine will send its primary tool to at any given time.
Repetier-host is a slicing AND gcode “serving” program - so it can take the gcode you made in EstlCAM and turn it into something the machine’s firmware (in this case a Marlin variant, if I’ve done my research) can actually understand as a series of commands.
I believe you could control it with estlcam if you used a different controller and ran GRBL instead of marlin. I saw there was a GRBL port for ramps but I don’t know if that would still allow estlcam to control it or not.