Basic control question. I have not figured out how to run the spindle up to speed outside of a normal file. For example, if I want to manually run the head around to flatten a slab, or skim the spoil board without making a program. It was pretty simple in Mach4. I have tried the MDI, and while it works fine to move the spindle in X, Y, and Z, it wont turn it on. I tried M3 S12000 which is how vectric writes it, and S12000 M3 which is what is in the CNC 12 manual, but neither turns it on. What am I missing?
You can’t (easily) turn on the spindle like this to do such things. This is actually by design. I think what you want is to do this:
There’s actually a much better way to do this. In CNC12 there’s a function called “Intercon”. Intercon is a conversational CNC programmer that will let you setup quick toolpaths like this very easily and quickly.
Did you guys ask for any feedback about this from the masses? I can understand making this an “option” I think a lot of us would like to have the old functionality available.
The use case for everyone that’s asked for this is slab flattening and table surfacing. Using intercon is a really easy and effective way to do this. You can control the exact stepover, feedrate, and depth for the cut. You can make an intercon file for this in under a minute, and you can even save off intercon files right in Centroid so you can recall them even faster.
It’s faster, easier and safer than the old manual way.
Doing this manually is not recommended as you have no real control over the feedrate.
I would highly recommend take Intercon for a spin. Despite it’s very simple interface it’s very fast and easy for this sort of stuff.
If you absolutely wanted to do this “the old way” you could write a two line text file and load it as a job:
M3 S12000 ;turn on spindle and set speed
M00 ;stop and allow operator to jog
I would not recommend doing this, but there is a way if you want to.
I assume there must be a way to make buttons in the VCP that can manually turn the spindle on and off and set the RPM. There are lots of reasons to want this basic capability that we have just taken for granted in Mach4. I don’t think you can spin not having this basic feature into being a good thing.
FWIW, this is already possible. I’ve used this, for example, to start the spindle at low RPM and use a mechanical edge finder.
On the MPG there is a switch that takes the spindle control from auto to manual. It is labelled “SPIN Auto|Man”. If you hit that, you change the spindle to manual mode or vice versa. Then the next switch over is the spindle power on / power off button labelled “SPIN On|Off”. The spindle will start at the lowest RPM setting if you have not already been using this.
Turn the jog control to SPIN, and you can use the MPG wheel to dial the spindle speed up and down.
I don’t know of a way to type a specific speed into the control and set the spindle speed directly in this mode.
You can also do “manual milling” of a sort using this, if you use the “power feed” controls.
That said, the conversational programming ability is pretty neat as well, and I’ve been making use of it to do simple things like face off a chunk of material quickly without going inside and sitting down at my desk and calling up Fusion 360 for a one off part.
You can accomplish this by simply typing in MDI “M3Sxxxxx” Once you do that your spindle will turn on and you’re free to jog wherever you like with either the pendant or the on screen controls. It’s even simpler than I said in this post:
The users that wanted this feature were slab flattening or surfacing their work surface. That’s much better done in Intercon: (In this video I show how to do a drill hole, but for slab flattening/surfacing you would select “rectangular pocket”)
@sehast Do you have a use case that’s different?
You can do the single line MDI command, or if you wanted to add it as a button it’s trivial to do, just follow the VCP docs that Centroid provides:
Centroid’s system is open for all kinds of customization. We haven’t taken any steps to prevent users like yourself from customizing things like this to suit your needs.
If you’re “sneaking up” on surfacing a slab you can do that with an intercon pocket. You don’t have to make a new pocket everytime you want to cut deeper, you just Z zero down a little lower each time.
So if you have a pendant you can just jog a little lower in Z, hit “=0” on the pendant and then cycle start and it will start cutting a pocket at the new depth.
If you have a keyboard only you just jog with that and do the same thing.
I use that purely for adjustments like pitch and roll. Put a 50mm bit in and move it 10cm with the pendant to see if it is perfectly aligned etc. or drill holes for adjustment pins. It is so much easier than writing g code or use other options. Just turn on spindle and move with the pendant to positions that I have marked with a pen…
You should try intercon. You can save off files for “one shot” operations like this that would be even faster. You can map them to on screen buttons too