Its to much fun

Hello Stu411,
Nice,
I bought a 420 too back in August this year from www.stoneycnc.co.uk, still milling for fun, it's ace. Good luck with the build and if you require any help, bung a post on the forum.

Best regards
Blan

blanthegenius Hi

Im very happy to here a reply from another 420 owner, I felt a little isolated there, but not so much now :cheer: I think im gona want to chat about this every so often, Either asking for help or Showing of some artwork, Ive never used a CNC machine before, but im pretty confident im gona have fun trying,

Now then, the reason im Posting,

ITS ARRIVED , yippee, :silly: The Fun is reaching near unbearable heights, only one problem, im not at my house at the moment :S , so I haven't even see it yet, but im just super happy its there,

I bought the kit420 and got it form the German site cause the payment option was simpler , well basically I couldn't see a payment option on the UK site and sending a Email seemed like it would take longer than clicking on Paynow

Emm what else, think that's it, apart from,

I wont be home for a good few weeks, but will post here when I get it Together, In the mean time , im familiarizing my self with a program called , "DRAFTSIGHT, so First Question blanthegenius [/color ](if you would be so kind) 😉 Q1: Will I beable to use this program along with the software that comes with the machine?

as far as I can tell, it works like this ? DRAFTSIGHT to make 2d line drawings in .DXF file format, Then software to turn the DXF into GCODE , Then load the GCODE into WINPCNC , then WINPCNC runs the 420,, is that right? thanks

ok. got it together, super happy with it, im using free software, Drawing shapes with "draftsight" importing dxf into "sheetcam" both programs are completely free, postprocessing with sheetcam and loading a plt file into winpc-nc then the machine does the rest, I still have tons to learn because all ive actually physically created are some lines on a piece of paper , but it feels like a success so far, yippee thanks

Sheetcam is not free. As far as I understand, there is a demo version which allows to test the software, but the g-code output is limited to 150 lines, which is not much. CamBam has a demo-version with a limit of 500 lines as far as I remember.

If you say you are loading PLT files, I'd assume that you talk about "WinPC NC starter". I also worked with it for one year now, but recently I learned that PLT has a limit in it's resolution which is really notable when milling. Here you can see. The arcs are not really round, they are polygons.

This problem is not even notable if you mill soft material like wood, but curved cuts in hard materials are much better when milled with g-code instead of PLT.

A lot of people here use EstlCAM which is also testable, but you can test with a full version - no limits for the output. It will only start waiting longer and longer after a period. And the price is unbeatable. Additionally it includes the firmware for an Arduino UNO (have a look) which then can control the stepcraft by processing g-code-files. Here are the files for creating an Stepcraft Shield for the UNO.

thanks for the info, much appreciated :whistle: :cheer:

Thanks very much again, I can now use cambam to create G-code , and it saves as a NC file , so my Winpc-nc usb opens it fine and the G-code can be edited, this is all super cool, will post a pic of something that ive made soon xx