So I’m new to all this. I cut/carved my first small project on my Altmill Mk1 the other day. I noticed that I had to start the spindle in Gsender manually before I started cutting or carving and that there is a speed control setting in gsender.
My question is am I supposed to manually set the spindle speed for each bit/job or does Gsender pull that information from the Gcode file and I just have to manually start the spindle and not worry about what speed its set to?
So like if I have the speed set to 18000 in gsender and I start the spindle, but the bit information calls for 15000, will the file automatically lower to the spindle to the correct speed?
@mu1sic2ian3 gSender gets the speed information from the gcode file. You put it there in your CAM software. It can’t “pull” anything that you didn’t put there.
You should not need to turn your spindle on manually. It sounds like you are not properly set up to use a spindle.
AND the VFD must be turned on BEFORE the SLB is powered on. You do have a spindle? not a router? If you have a router then you do have to start it manually as you describe.
Look at your gcode with notepad or other text editor. You should see something like this:
@Lenp You raise a good point, Len. I replied on the basis of @mu1sic2ian3 post that he has a spindle, not a router. If it’s a router, then all is done manually.
No I definitely have the spindle. I think what happened was when I first set up the Altmill, I kept getting the error where the spindle wasn’t getting up to speed in time to cut. So I got used to pre-starting the spindle to avoid that error. There was a gap in time before I used the machine again and I forgot all about it.
I’ll try again without pre-starting the spindle to see what happens.
As I mentioned before, you HAVE to start the VFD before you turn on the controller (SLB-ext). If you start the controller first, there is no handshaking between it and the VFD and, as a result, spindle speed will not be controlled automatically.
I just re-read my earlier post and I had erroneously used ‘gSender’ instead of the ‘controller’. My apologies for that error. And to be absolutely clear, the VFD is controlled (and connected) to the controller (SLB-ext). So, VFD first, controller after that.