My new Shapeoko 3 is it just me?

[ArtF]

Getting there Richard,


  That gear would run fine. (Little bit of backlash on one axis.. but no big deal. )
Id study up a bit on Gcode, simple things like G0,G1,G2 and G3. You get hose commands
down and you can pretty much make it work as you wish.

G'Luck
Art

[Rocket]

Thanks Art....

I have been studying all day and making trial gears....

When I make a gear in Gearotic and it generates G code, why
does the machine travel so far from where I zero z axis (always lower left hand corner)
until it get to where it starts to cut???

The bowl of crow was not delicious.

R

[ArtF]

Rocket:

Crow never tastes good, roasted , fried, scrambled, damn feathers get stuck in your teeth.
(Ive had countless portions over the years.. Screw it, you move on. :) )

  >>why does the machine travel so far from where I zero z axis

  Gearotic tries to be clever about order. For example, it will want to cut the center shaft out first, because the gear may float around and destroy the cut if it did the outside first. In Workbench, you'll
notice there is an origin sign, ( the thing that looks like a radiation symbol..). Thats what GM sees
as the point 0,0 . SO if you look at your gear, youll see the center is at 5,5.

  So, when you zero, your 5,5 away from the shaft, so your tool has to pick up and go there.

Now if you jog to 5,5 and then start the program, it wont move so far. OR, as you learn
Gearotic, you'll find you can tell it where 0,0 is. You can generate the gear with the shaft  at 0,0
instead of the bottom left, (you can place the origin anywhere in terms of generating the code.).
You can drag the gear to any place when you generate the code and its numbers in the Gcode will
reflect that.

  Its all about coordinates, you can generate them to be starting from anywhere, and you can zero
anywhere on your table. So you just have to understand how those two things work. I suggest
you drag your gear around the workbench screen to new locations, generate code and look at the differences, it will help you understand how zeroing and code generation go hand in hand.

Art

[Rocket]

Getting there Richard,


   That gear would run fine. (Little bit of backlash on one axis.. but no big deal. )
Id study up a bit on Gcode, simple things like G0,G1,G2 and G3. You get hose commands
down and you can pretty much make it work as you wish.

G'Luck
Art

what does Little bit of backlash on one axis.. but no big deal............... mean?

[Rocket]

A bit of humor among all this work...

A photo of some guy with my wife in my Turbocharged SlingShot SL.

[Rocket]

Photo of last gear......

It is getting better..........

RR

[ArtF]

Much Much Better. I cant even see any backlash. (but then I cant see backlash unless you show it
straight down shot.

  Backlash causes round to be less than round. It can be on one axis or both, but your original
gear appeared to show it only on one. It may be the first gear moved a bit on its tape, you'll
notice backlash if you cut a circle. It should be perfectly round. If not, one of your axis
has a bit of backlash. If you'd like to test that, just select your gear on the project tree and select
"Strip Teeth", your gear will turn into a spoked circle , suitable for wagon trains.. and should,
if cut, be perfectly round.

  (Nothing in life is perfect, it may vary a bit, most of us like to know just how small
or large that "bit" is. We can then fix it, or plan for it. ).

So , good job, all that reading is paying off, you and the Donald "almost" deserve the
treasure in that photo. (The car's nice too..)

Art

[Rocket]

Art.............

What causes this..........left side perfect, ride side not.....

I check all alignment on machine....seems good...

R

[ArtF]

one side of the table is slightly higher than the other. Use a sacrificial piece underneath
and cut deeper than the thickness of the board..

Art

[Rocket]

Do you ever not work?????

Your worst than me......are you married?

What does your wife think of your hours....???

RR

[ArtF]

Sleep? That's allowed?

After 36 years she's used to my  odd hours and general
eccentricities. :)  ..

Art

[Rocket]

Art,

About one month ago, i purchased a download file of
a gear clock from Clayton Boyer.

It is in dxf format, can I get those gears into Gearotic to cut them?

RR

[John T]

I've been a Clayton Boyer fan for some time, and I import his designs into Aspire which is a variant of Vectric.  I can then generate gCode for all the "shapes" directly from that program or as I often do I take the dimensions off the dxf drawing and reverse engineer the gears in gearotic. 

This combination of techniques gives me the best of both.

John

[ArtF]

Hi:

At the moment, you cannot import a dxf to generate toolpaths. Soon however, you can.
Auggie has now hit a point where its capabilities will start to add to Gearotics. Its now importing
DXF's here, and I'm adding editing and toolpathing to the loads.

  Ive been lucky in that Gearotic is mature enough I could switch hats to a controller this year,
and though I am aware many will use MAch3 or other controllers for hardware and comforts sake,
it was my plan from the start to integrate functionality between the two.

  So shortly, Auggie will load dxf's of any kind, allow you to join, move, swap and add vector data,
and post out as Gcode or other forms. This vector import will include GCode, so one can load Gcode
as a vector drawing, modify it, and repost it. Combined with DXF import, this will allow much more
power to the user in various ways.

  So even if one doesnt use Auggie as a controller, they will still be able to use its CAD/CAM capabilities
in concert with Gearotic to do more.

Art

 

[BillM]

Hi Art

Up to now I've been ignoring the Augie portion of your software because I have no CNC or automated methods.  I concentrate solely on simulations.  As you already noticed my emphasis so far has been on a Chronometer and a tower clock simulation.  I'm working on a video that would highlight the workings of the two simulations.

To add a DXF import/CAD capabilities to Augie would be handy.

A hack to get DXF gears inserted into Gearotics would be to know from a CAD program the overall dimensions/tooth count/shape, or other specs of the gear contained in the DXF  and then use Gearotics tools to match the key parameters using the Calculate (diameter or shaft spacing) to fine tune things.

When I first started a Chronometer simulation project, I had a description of the chronometer and rough scale drawings of gear outlines (see jpg).  I used a simpler program, a gear template generator http://woodgears.ca/gear/index.html, to get an idea of what the gears would look like. After I printed out the gear outlines and overlaid them on the drawings I thought that it would be cool to simulate the mechanism.  That's when I discovered Gearotics and felt it would be a worth a try.

For the tower clock simulation, I had access to the mechanism and was able to measure gear diameters (or sometimes circumferences), tooth counts, shaft spacings, etc. and used the tools in Gearotics to build the simulations.

The resulting simulations are close enough for me to illustrate the workings of the mechanisms.

Bill