Fusion 360 CAM to CNC problem

[jago21]

Hello! CNC newbie here.

My team has recently gotten a Velox 5050 and we are in the process of setting it up. So far we have the spindle running and can manually jog the machine around. We are using Fusion 360 for CAM. We know we are doing the CAM right because it will simulate and looks good, but when we put the nc program on Mach 3 we encounter a couple of problems. When we load the Gcode the outline of the program does not show up in the top right corner of Mach 3. Stuff does show up but it is not the part from CAM. Text does appear in the top left window. When we pressed Cycle start we got an error message in the Status window that says something about the first line of text in the top left window not working. Unfortunately I don’t remember exactly what the error message was but it said something to that effect.

Currently I don’t know what is wrong. I assume it comes from the creation of the program. What should the first lines of the .nc program look like? why would Mach 3 give error messages for wrong Gcode? How should we generate the programs - “Post Process” or “Create NC program”?

Thanks for the help!

[Akash_Rastogi]

Are you sure you’re loading the proper file type for a velox?

[Cyberphil]

When you export the G code for your machine, make sure the postprocessor is set to Mach 3.

It could already be, but you just didn’t mention that so I’m assuming it’s not set.

Edit: Just to further explain a bit, each machine control software (Mach 3 in your case) takes a special ‘flavor’ of G code. When you generate the tool paths in Fusion you are not writing the G code. Your post processing takes what is visually represented in Fusion and converts it to the specific language your machine can understand. They are all very similar but still have some differences, and it is important you are using the correct post for your machine control software.

[BitSentinel]

You should use the post process button in fusion, and select the correct post processor from the dropdown. You should be able to find the correct post processor online with a little bit of research. A generic mach 3 profile might work, I don’t really know, but I know avid CNC has a different one for their routers that run mach 3.

It should give you a g-code file that looks something like this