ESTLCAM Problem follow up

CAD/CAM Software Tips
1

I purchased Estlcam and I like the simplicity, the gcode files it generated contained too many movements and cut very slowly, ridiculously slowly. I switched to Fusion but those traitors have pulled the free bait and switch. I wanted to revisit and ask if anyone has found a way to prevent the generation of over precise gcode in Estlcam or is the solution to use the CNC controller in estlcam to control the maslow. Any replies are appreciated.

2

Have you tried a gcode cleaner? Estlecam controller won’t likely work just like easel controller won’t work.

3

I have not, I have looked at some of the posts on those in this forum. I have not had enough time to parse them enough to isolate which and how I could apply that to Estlcam output meaningfully. It is a whole other tangent of self education I have not had time for. I hate to put it that way but that is my problem, my constraint. Maybe over Christmas while on holiday I can focus on it.

I made some award plaques last year for volunteer youth group activities I am involved in using estlcam. The engraving worked really well but just a few lines took hours for each one, it should have been a max 30 min operation. I have been requested to make 3x as many this year.

4

Maybe if you post your offending gcode, @md8n can see if his cleaner will help. Was there a particular section that could be isolated?

5

estlcam takes a simple approach to path matching which obviously works, but the tolerances on it are too fine resulting in around 10 commands per millimeter of movement on even relatively large arcs. It gets slow because the Arduino can only process around 10 commands per second, i.e. you get a feed rate of 1mm per second regardless of what your F value is set to.

That’s kind of the original motivation for GCodeClean. It includes a few command line options to adjust tolerance values as it tweaks the path. G0 and G1 commands that are colinear are simple merged into a single command. Also multiple G1 commands are tracked to see if they can be fitted to a G2 or G3 command within the tolerance values, although there’s still some limitations on that.

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6

Wow thanks all, here is one of the files in question.SIGHTEDCOMPOUND12.nc (2.3 MB)

7

Any recent follow up to this, or use of ESTLCAMM in general

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8

GCodeClean is here:
Command line version: Releases ¡ md8n/GCodeClean (github.com) - prebuilt releases for Windows, Linux and Arm (Raspberry PI), but you can build it for other stuff like Macs for example
Gui version: Releases ¡ md8n/GCodeCleanGUI (github.com) - Windows only so far, this is really just putting a GUI on the above code.

The README in the command line version states what is currently performed:

  • eliminating redundant lines (within tolerances),
  • converting very short arcs (G2, G3) to simple lines (G1), also within tolerances,
  • linear to arc deduplication, converting several simple lines to a single arc,
  • eliminate meaningless movement commands - especially G0 without any arguments,
  • correcting G1 to G0 when the z-axis is at a positive value,
  • clipping decimal places on arguments to meaningful values (as per the NIST spec),
  • per line linting: splitting lines to match the actual execution order as per the NIST gcode spec, and then reorganising the ‘words’ on a line to conform to some common practices (but not all),
  • annotate the GCode with explanatory comments (optional),
  • ‘soft’, ‘medium’, ‘hard’ or custom removal of superfluous tokens (minimise).
  • preamble linting: Adding a ‘standard’ set of gcode declarations, i.e. converting the ‘implicit’ to ‘explicit’.
  • postamble linting: Similar to the preamble, but at the end of the file (obviously).
  • file terminator matching: Ensuring that if the file demarcation character % is used at the start of the file then it is also used at the end.
  • splitting of GCode files into individual files, each with a single cutting path.
  • merging of previously split files, with some effort at ordering them to reduce the amount of travelling (G0) distance in total.

Also ESTLCam continues to be worked on. So yeah try it out as well for actual CAM work.

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9

Thank you for the update, I used ESTLCAM today (V 12) and all seemed to work ok. I did the whole process from design in Inkscape (SVG) through EstlCam for the Gcode, and then on to Web Control (old version) that was running on a Pi. I didnt use GCodeClean but to be fair I was only doing a fairly simple “test” file, but liked the ease of set up with EstlCam. Its a shame that ESTLCAM CNC controller doesnt also work with Maslow… (sorry I have assumed it doesnt) … so we could just use the one neat package.

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