When I load a large (~30000 line, perhaps) gcode file into ground control, it seems to get reallky bogged down, resulting in painfully slow cuts. I’ve found that if I split the files up into about 10000 lines each, the problem is mitigated somewhat, and things go at a much more reasonable pace.
The most recent cut I’ve experienced this with was a pretty complex relief carving of a face, so it was made up of many many very small XYZ moves. And it seems to take around two seconds between each command. When I split the file up into 3, it seems to go at least twice as fast, maybe a little more.
Appologies for the vagueness of my description, but, is this behaviour well known? It’s not terribly tricky to split the files up, but it would be really nice if I didn’t need to take that extra step.
I wonder if the recently developed code simplifier would cut down your gcode line count… it sounds like a ram issue on the machine you are running webcontrol or groundcontrol. These programs load and feed. If there are too many and you see a huge lag, it really sounds like a limited ram issue, but that is a speculative guess.
When things were going really slowly, I checked out the ram/cpu usage, and neither seemed to be maxing out. Still, it does seem like the likely culprit…
I run groundcontrol on an old laptop I have which still has reasonable performance. So I suspect that ram and/or cpu performance may be an issue for you based on what you’ve described.
But I also had a large-ish carving that I’ve just done ~180,000 lines of gcode.
I found that there was another limitation of the arduino only handling about ~10 lines of gcode per second. So if each line of gcode is a fraction of a mm, then yeah, the cut is reaaaaaaally slow.
Which is why I started developing the command line gcode cleaner utility. Still very early days with it (I started on Saturday last weekend). PM me with your file and I could try ‘cleaning’ it. Or grab a copy of the code yourself
Thanks for posting. Im gearing up for a new M2 kit comming this week. The mini pc sounds interesting! I’ve had similar issues with large files on my shaper origin and students x carve. The source of the issues was due to the conversation of SVG and DXF files from arcs to poly lines same goes for Fusion 360 and the smoothing tollerace. Anyway CAD tools convert all the arcs into millons of little line segments to replicate the arc and it just chokes the hard ware trying to manage all those tiny line segments. Do some playing with the settings in your cad tool and view it in a back plotter like NCviewer.com.