Making a spoilboard using vcarve

Discussion/questions about software used with your CNC Shark and programming issues

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edowney
Posts: 20
Joined: Sun Mar 20, 2016 8:04 pm

Making a spoilboard using vcarve

Post by edowney »

I've created a spoilboard design in vcarve which basically cuts a lot of small round holes in a piece of mdf that I then mount to my cnc shark's normal spoilboard. I do this so I can cut vinyl records and I want to be able to easily create new spoilboards as I chew through them fairly regularly. For some reason my new spoilboard design has some holes that off a bit. So I went in to vcarve copied down the center points of one of the holes that look good in vcarve but didn't land right on the spoilboard and did some hunting in the tap file I created. For some reason the tap file is only accurate out to a single decimal place. Any idea why that would be? Is there a setting I'm missing in vcarve? The center hole isn't even 0,0 - you would think it could get that right.

Rando
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Re: Making a spoilboard using vcarve

Post by Rando »

I'm only seeing one place in the software to change the number of decimal places. Well, besides changing mm to inches; mm will typically only be out to 0.01mm, while in inches it can be 0.001 or even 0.0001. It's not required to included trailing zeros, so if there's no value out there, often the digits won't be output.

The location where (maximum number of) decimal places is specified is Inside the Post-processor file you're using. If that term means nothing to you, no problem, I left that out in case you did; there's lots of info available on the post processor files.

In the one you've selected (you ARE using the right one...right?), on about line 52, there are a bunch of variable definitions. You can see the indicated number of decimal points in the 1.1 and 1.4 numbers. Do verify those are correct, but my guess is they're fine. That said, you can see from those that Spindle speed, feed rate and plunge rate have 0, 1 and 1 decimal place. Example from the post I'm using is like this:

VAR LINE_NUMBER = [N|A|N|1.0]
VAR SPINDLE_SPEED = [S|A|S|1.0]
VAR CUT_RATE = [FC|A|F|1.1]
VAR PLUNGE_RATE = [FP|A|F|1.1]
VAR X_POSITION = [X|A| X|1.4]
VAR Y_POSITION = [Y|A| Y|1.4]
VAR Z_POSITION = [Z|A| Z|1.4]
VAR ARC_CENTRE_I_INC_POSITION = [I|A| I|1.4]
VAR ARC_CENTRE_J_INC_POSITION = [J|A| J|1.4]
VAR X_HOME_POSITION = [XH|A| X|1.4]
VAR Y_HOME_POSITION = [YH|A| Y|1.4]
VAR Z_HOME_POSITION = [ZH|A| Z|1.4]

Oh...and make sure the line near the top in your GCode file says "G64 P0.010" or something small, not P0.1. If the larger value is there, then things will find a way to get confusingly inaccurate. That could be the problem of the positioning, maybe separate from the GCode decimal precision.

Hope that points you in the right direction, edowney.

Thom
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