Student Needs Help

[Sherwood HS Fab Lab]

I am a student in high school attempting to learn G coding for a plasma cutter and my teacher says it is possible to write the code in something like a word document and somehow have the program partworks read it. Can anyone tell me if this is actually possible and if so, how I do it. This is the first time we have attempted this so no one knows what to do. A work around would also be acceptable. For reference the coding I am talking about looks like this

G01 X1 Y1
G01 X4 Y1
And then it continues.

[dana_swift]

John- a "word" type program is usually designed to write letters and documents, they are a horrible choice for writing instructions for machines. These programs are designed to carefullly control the apperance of a printed version of the document. This has no value to a CNC machine.

The kind of program you need is a "text editor", which is a very different beast, it can edit raw strings of letters, which may be words, but dont need to be. These programs have no ability to include photographs, or other such nice things that business documents need. The final appearance of the text depends on factors outside the control of the text editor. Editing for this post is done in "text" mode. Formatting depends on your browsers interpretation of the text.

There are a lot of file extensions that are "text" files with nothing in them but english text, however it is designed to be readable by both humans and computers. G code files are one example of this kind of file, there are thousands of others.

I would suggest you download Notepad++ as a good starting point. Its a text editor which is very popular. It will do a nice job on any kind of text file.

G codes were originally defined by a company named "Gerber". Gerber made a series of computer controlled photo plotting machines, so G means "Gerber command". Today the root definition of G codes is contined in a standards document named RS374X.

When CNC machine tools came along, the Gerber codes were already well established by the Gerber comany and so it was used to define machine control codes for the CNC machines. Most of the move, and control codes are common to the CNC and RS374X.

The CNC version of G codes is not as well standardized, as each manufacturer feels free to use custom codes as long as they dont conflict with the RS374X standard. There is no equivalent to RS374X in the CNC industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code

Shopbot CNC tools correctly interpret and support the core group of G codes, however the control program SB3 is designed to work with either G or "shopbot codes". Shopbot codes are usually 2 letter mnemonics that are easier to remember and work with than Gnn codes. Shopbot codes are more like:

MX,3 ! Move X to 3 (usually inches, but can be metric)
M2,4,5 ! Move 2 Axes X & Y to 4,5. Cartesian coordinates.

There are plenty of others, but the letter-number or letter-letter combinations are easier to remember what they do than G02 or equivalent, which has to be looked up each time it is used until it is memorized.

Hope that helps-

D

[ssflyer]

John,

Partworks won't "read" G-Code. That is the code that Dana explained very well, that is sent directly to your machine. Partworks is design software that will output G-Code (or anything else the Post Processors support)

[chiloquinruss]

'Most' word processors will let you select the file format when you save the file. Select the TXT file format which strips off any extra goodies like bold, underline, indent, tabs, etc,. That way you end up with the file being readable by the machines. Be extra careful with punctuation though as commas and semi colons etc, will change what you have coded. If you have a question on some code, post it here for review and let the 'experts' have a look. Have fun. Russ

[gene]

Yall are way above my pay grade:eek:

[myxpykalix]

You could download the shopbot control software and in there is a "Shopbot editor" that you can use to write code with. You could download some of the various vectric demos and create part cut files, save them, and read the various .sbp files to see the language it uses.

[donek]

I am a student in high school attempting to learn G coding for a plasma cutter and my teacher says it is possible to write the code in something like a word document and somehow have the program partworks read it. Can anyone tell me if this is actually possible and if so, how I do it. This is the first time we have attempted this so no one knows what to do. A work around would also be acceptable. For reference the coding I am talking about looks like this

G01 X1 Y1
G01 X4 Y1
And then it continues.

G-code is nothing but a text file. You can edit in a number of different editors, but if you're on a windows machine, notepad is the most common. If you google "write g-code", you'll find a lot of resources. The number one result comes from CNC cookbook, which is typically very good. There are so many resources for this topic if you simply do a search.

[Rob Gunn]

John, Many years ago I had a old Bridgeport CNC mill that we programed manually and used Notepad to do it. I am not sure what all had to be done in the post processor to make it work but it did work. I would suggest you go to the manufacturer of your plasma cutter and find out what they suggest that may work with there controller? Good luck and let us know what you find out and show us you end project.