I’m trying to make a couple of signs for some guys at work. It gives me a chance to do some designing and practice on the machine with some different kinds of files. I’ve created a circular sign in Inkscape but when EstlCAM makes the G-Code just for the circle cutout it says there is over 100000 lines of code. I’m thinking it’s trying to cut up the circle into a lot of little linear commands. I have use G2/G3 arcs checked off in EstlCAM. When I try to load the code in UGS it says Error while starting file stream. I’ve successfully made some letter signs and cut out some squares but it seems the circles are an issue. Maybe I didn’t make them right in Inkscape? I found when I made an SVG in inkscape I had to select all the objects and use Object to Path and Stroke to Path both to make it show up in EstlCAM as I designed it.
Yeah, if you turn off G2/G3, it will make a bunch of little lines. You can try to turn them on and see how it goes (air cut, or foam if you don’t want to risk the material). Version 418, and 421 has some fixes for small arcs, but I think older versions work ok for big arcs.
I zoomed in to the O with Inkscape, and switched to ‘Edit paths by node (F2)’ and could see that there were only 8 nodes in the inner circle and 16 in the outer (not hundreds), so that’s OK.
Then I opened it in Estlcam and just selected the inner circle, and it did it in about 14 arcs and a couple of very short straight lines:
Here is another one for example. If all I want to do is cut out the outside of this EstlCAM tells me it will be 100000+ lines and if I want to continue. Here is that SVG. Brentland.zip (12.8 KB)
Thank you - I should have thought of that. With G02/03 off, it creates about 200 very short straight lines, not a million. I wonder what the difference is?
What dialect of gcode do you have set for EstlCAM to emit? With G02/G03 turned off, What setting is there for how to break the arc up into linear segments? e.g., max/min number of segments, min/max segment length?
I get the same behaviour with the Brentland image: about 12 arcs or about 300 short lines.
I’ve got Estelcam set to use Marlin, but I can’t see any settings for the number of segments.
I wondered if it mattered which units I used when importing. The first time I had used mm (and got 300 lines) so I tried inches and got about 200 lines, dunno if that’s relevant.
Not sure I understand. It creates an .nc file. I just tried another one with just 3 letters THE. It created a huge .nc file and the machine was oscillating around the same spot for a long time. It is really wierd. I ran an older .nc file I made last week and it came out perfect.English THE.zip (2.5 MB)
OK, a couple of things. That’s not Marlin-compatible. Grbl-compatible, maybe. Comments should be prefaced with a semi-colon, not in parentheses. Also, you’re running at 15mm/s, correct? That sounds fast, but you know your machine’s capabilities. Do you have the header for the file, or does is dig straight into the milling sequences?
I would double-check that it’s generating Marlin G-Code.
Plunge angle is 90 degrees. It has to be a setting in EstlCAM that I must have changed by accident. I tried making a square in Inkscape and making the paths in EstlCAM and I got the same error again
Is it worth posting the Settings Estlcam.txt file, or any of the others, so we can compare to ours?
There are loads of settings, so it might be hard to spot the one that’s making a difference.
Alternately, is there a way to reset Estlcam to it’s defaults? Renaming all the settings files might work, or you might need to reinstall. Then check that works OK, then change one thing at a time to see what difference each change makes.