I am at my wits end with this. I drew a circle in inkscape, opened it with estlcam, checked it with repetier host and everything was fine. I put it on an SD card to print on the machine and it prints in the shape of an “S”. It does the first half of the circle properly (think clockwise from 9 to 3) but when it gets to the halfway point (where it should circle back) it goes backwards ( think counterclockwise from 9 to 3) in one continuous line. I recorded a video of it but apparently all things electronic have deciced not to cooperate with me today. Thanks in advance.
motors and electronics were purchased from vicious one. running marlin
Hah, that’s a new one. Can you paste your gcode up here? I have a feeling it’s not doing arc commands right, for some reason (G02/G03). There is a checkbox in estlcam to make it do lines instead of arcs, which should turn into a bunch of G1 commands. I haven’t had the arc issues, but I know it’s a common fix to funny problems like this.
It seems the screenshots i took of the gcode didn’t load. FWIW I have the “use arc commands G02/ G03” box checked and the “I/J coordinates are relative” box checked in ESTLCAM
Under where you write text for your post is a gray box with the words, “Select file”. Click that button and it will open up a dialog to select the file. Then you can submit your post as usual.
@Ryan, Something seems to be broken with the upload.
Upload Errors:
bear_bear.gcode: File not uploaded.
bear_bear_2.gcode: File not uploaded.
beer_bear.txt: File not uploaded.
beer_bear.zip: File not uploaded.
rubber-duck_0.jpg: File not uploaded.
could someone explain what the ESTLCAM CNC program settings mean? I understand the X,Y,and Z, but what about the rest of the alphabet (I,J,F,S, and N)?
I, J are the X, Y location of the center of an arc. F is feedrate S is spindle speed (I think) and N is line number (I think). They are all gcode standards. All the info you could ever want on gcodes is here:
So, this looks circle “like” It’s not really a circle. The center for each of the arcs is moving around,It’s 280x250 in size. Is that what you expected?
At any rate, uncheck that box that says, “use arc commands G02/ G03”.
Thank you for your patience and help. I confess it is not really a circle. That seems about right for the size. I was troubleshooting and not very concerned with the exact dimension. How does unchecking that box fix this?
Good, I’m not crazy (just wrong) about the circle.
The arcs looked OK to me in gcode, but I’m not the Marlin firmware, and I know some people get odd results when using arcs in Marlin.
But, it didn’t work, eh? So back to the drawing board. To reiterate, it’s basically only travelling in the +y direction, instead of going back down in y, it goes up. Is that right?
Are you using endstops?
Can you manually move the machine in all directions?
What about this gcode (don’t bother having it cut)?
Well I think it's a bad MEGA board causing the problem. I say think because I swapped it out with another one I had and was able to move all three axes by hand. But when I loaded up the circle program I bumped into the board about halfway through the program and POOF,it shutdown. Upon a closer inspection I realized I moved one of the heat sinks and it must have shorted something out. I'll get a new MEGA and see if that fixes it. Thank you for all your patience and help with this.