NEED HELP! CNC Software Problem

[Doug G]

We use that same machine on our team and the post-processor is most likely the problem. Have you tried the new AutoDesk Inventor with HSM for 2016? AutoDesk sent me a post for the CNCMasters machine and it works well so far. AutoDesk products are free for students and teams, you may want to try it.

[androb4]

Originally Posted by Doug G

We use that same machine on our team and the post-processor is most likely the problem. Have you tried the new AutoDesk Inventor with HSM for 2016? AutoDesk sent me a post for the CNCMasters machine and it works well so far. AutoDesk products are free for students and teams, you may want to try it.

The OP would be able to use the post you received from Autodesk if he uses HSMWorks or HSMXpress in Solidworks because that's what Inventor uses for CAM. That way he won't have to switch CAD software.

HSMXpress is the lite version of HSMWorks, but still very powerful. There's really no need to get HSMWorks unless you want to do 3D operations. HSMXpress is free for anyone who has a Solidworks license. HSMWorks isn't free but you can get a free copy by requesting a sponsorship (just like Solidworks).

[SndMndBdy]

My team uses InventorCAM (the Inventor version of SolidCAM) and Mach3 as the controller (similar to MasterMX) and when we first started, we had a very similar problem. The issue was the post processor, as as some other people have suggested. If you call SolidCAM support, you can explain to them your setup and they should be able to provide you with the correct post processor.

For those who don't know, the post processor is part of the CAM software that generates GCode specific to the CNC machine/controller that you are using. While GCode is supposed to be standard (interpreted the same by everyone) it definitely is not and there are idiosyncrasies between setups.

I suspect that in your case, the default post processor is adding in some extra code at the start or end of your program that's not being interpreted correctly by MasterMX. This might be for something like an automated tool change, etc., which your machine might not support.

In our case when we got the correct post processor it solved most of these problems, but I actually still had to tweak the post processor a bit myself. This is a complicated task - the post processor is like a programming language which may be hard to understand / modify unless you are a seasoned programmer. If you get to this stage and are still having trouble, feel free to post here and I can try to help.

The other thing to look at is the settings in MasterMX. There might be some options in here about how to interpret Gcode. I remember in our case there was a setting about how G02 was supposed to work (with regards to R address or IJK addresses), but I don't recall exactly what that was.