by Antonio » Fri Mar 14, 2014 11:41 am
by Antonio
Fri Mar 14, 2014 11:41 am
After assembling a ShapeOko (
http://www.shapeoko.com) I followed the expertly written build instructions onto the "hello world" chapter where I was prompted to head over to
http://www.makercam.com to create some geometry and export it as g-code. What the ShapeOko (loaded with a marker pen) created had very little resemblence to the geometry I created, and after some digging around, I seem to have found the problem.

- What?
- IMG-20140313-00459_031414_103028_AM.jpg (110.9 KiB) Viewed 16205 times
When exporting g-code from makercam in cm, the resulting file has coordinates with a large number of decimal places. When the file is read by Universal G-Code Sender, it returns an error because each line of instructions is too long for it to handle. I tried exporting the same geometry in inches and found that all coordinates were down to three decimal places, making each line much shorter. The result speaks for itself:

- Nice one...
- IMG-20140313-00458_031414_102833_AM.jpg (76.91 KiB) Viewed 16205 times
Another tip that might make life easier is to run makercam locally by saving the swf file (available here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/177360212/site/makercam/makercam.swf) to your computer.
Antonio
After assembling a ShapeOko (
http://www.shapeoko.com) I followed the expertly written build instructions onto the "hello world" chapter where I was prompted to head over to
http://www.makercam.com to create some geometry and export it as g-code. What the ShapeOko (loaded with a marker pen) created had very little resemblence to the geometry I created, and after some digging around, I seem to have found the problem.

- What?
- IMG-20140313-00459_031414_103028_AM.jpg (110.9 KiB) Viewed 16205 times
When exporting g-code from makercam in cm, the resulting file has coordinates with a large number of decimal places. When the file is read by Universal G-Code Sender, it returns an error because each line of instructions is too long for it to handle. I tried exporting the same geometry in inches and found that all coordinates were down to three decimal places, making each line much shorter. The result speaks for itself:

- Nice one...
- IMG-20140313-00458_031414_102833_AM.jpg (76.91 KiB) Viewed 16205 times
Another tip that might make life easier is to run makercam locally by saving the swf file (available here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/177360212/site/makercam/makercam.swf) to your computer.
Antonio