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.
Have you tried a gcode cleaner? Estlecam controller won’t likely work just like easel controller won’t work.
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.
Maybe if you post your offending gcode, @md8n can see if his cleaner will help. Was there a particular section that could be isolated?
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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