Hi there from sunny (NOT) sheffield UK.....can anyone help this old dood with this project idea Im a former geog teacher who really wants to make some cool 3d mountain carvings in lovely oak on my workbee cnc Its been inoperable for the last year due to the conroller f****ing up The KIND FOLK at openbuilds sent me an old new one and HURRAH i'm up and jogging again.......using openbuilds CONTROL as the interface to the machine as before. Soooo Ive had the idea of the 3d maps and started the research....found out about Terrain2STL software and got myself a cool 3d STL file of Snowdon (highest mtn in Wales) So now i want to import the STL file into CONTROL and get it routed......have tried but am getting confused....any tips thanks ROY
You need a CAM program that takes the STL file and produces the tool paths/gcode to feed to Control. I know that Fusion 360 *can* do it, but I don't think it's ideal, and there must be others. One problem you may have is that the STL has too many facets ("triangles") for the CAM program - it may be hundreds of thousands, but (IIRC) Fusion 360 gets very confused over ~10,000. You may need to use something like 'Meshmixer' and/or 'Blender' (free programs) to clean up and reduce the number of facets to something manageable before feeding it to the CAM program. It can be a bit complicated, but there are quite a few Youtube videos on the whole process. One example, but there are many: (Snowdon, btw, and its the highest mountain in Wales and England ) Andy (In Wales )
i found touch terrain a little easier to use than terrain to stl. yes fusion struggles with massively detailed stls . i found that its best to get the stl file out of touch terrain as close to the final size that you want hence reducing any work you have to do in fusion. below is one i ran recently of the fairfield horse shoe in the lake district. about 150 x 150 x 30mm in oak.
Estlcam can pull in STL files and generate appropriate roughing and finishing tool paths. I cut a 200mm x 200mm 3D map of Pembrokeshire in Oak from the garden.
thanks people for your help Ive managed to get STL files off touch terrain and sort gcode via carveco which is easily imported into openbuilds UNFORTUNATELY!!! the job starts ok then after about 30 mins of cutting the roughing path goes t*ts up and loses the zero mark then starts cutting in mid air away from the stock!! any one any clues as to whats going wrong i could restart he cutting after aborting the job, re-centering /re-zeroing and staring from where it failed (i can see in the gcode editor where it stops but dont know how to jump to that line without running all the code from line 1 !!!) AGGGGGh its so frustrating! any help would be apreciated
Loss of position could be 1) Wiring (intermittent loss of connection from a loose terminal or damaged cable): docs:blackbox-x32:faq-identify-motor-coils [OpenBuilds Documentation] 2) Mechanical binding (check wheels, leadscrews, nutblocks - all smooth no binding?) 3) Acceleration or Max Rate set too high for the offending axis that looses position: Grbl v1.1 Configuration and Grbl v1.1 Configuration Wizards and Tools > Recover stopped/crashed Job - but make the machine reliable first.
cutting up in the air means Z lost position. how hot does the Z motor get? if you cannot touch it for 5 seconds it is too hot, wich means it is getting too much current, which means the driver is probably also getting hot and may be shutting down to self protect. more likely is that the max rate and acceleration of the Z axis is too high for the weight or for the cutting forces. How hard is it plunging down during the cut? if it is too fast it will miss some steps, resulting in cutting too high for the rest of the file, as you describe. solutions: make sure you are using a center cutting bit that is sharp and clean make sure you are doing a sensible roughing cut so the finishing bit doe snot have to work hard. reduce plunge feedrate to give it time to cut and clear chips. reduce maxrate and acceleration (in GRBL settings) to give it breathing room, esp acceleration in this case, reduce to 75% of current value and test.
On BlackBox that shuts down the driver, lights up the Fault LED. Stays faulted until power cycled. OP can check it its lit
