Hewing hall millgrav

[John S]

Sorry can't help but I have recently picked a fulling working Roland engraver up from a school, came with all software and book but to be honest it was that old fashioned. You had to jump through nested menus upon nested menus that I never even bothered plugging it in and ripped the dedicated boards out of it and will fit a combined Chinese 3 axis board which will be fine for such a small machine as this.

My reasoning behind this is that all the other home shop machines are on Mach and I don't want to learn another program, plus files will be interchangable between the router and this engraver if size allows.

[Jonathan]

You could try this method:

http://xkcd.com/627/

:whistling:

School had a Roland PNC2300A, but after I'd gone the stepper driver (as you described - lots of menus) broke, so they just dismantled it for parts ... such a waste as it could easily have ran from a cheap Chinese board and mach3. Was a very useful machine ... my friend even cut Titanium on it!

[John S]

That's the one I have Jonathan, the 2300A, also picked up the matching mill, a PNC3100, jogs but won't run a program.

That's going the same way, gut and transplant, waiting for a batch of driver boards from china.

[Jonathan]

That's the one I have Jonathan, the 2300A

What program have you tried to run it? We ran it just via Techsoft 2D Design V2. You just drew the part, drew contours for the toolpath and assigned different tools and depths to different colour lines. Then just print to the 2300.. I thought it was quite good since as you're actually drawing the toolpaths you have full control, easy to use system (though hard to do anything other than 2.5D).

(any news on those rails?)