Sunday, November 28, 2010

EMC2, G64 and sharp corners

I've cut a number of things on my CNC machine using EMC2. I've been perplexed by the fact that some of the corners in my test shapes were not sharp, but were rounded off.

I've just been designing and cutting some new leadnut holders and found that the hexagonal depression I was cutting was also plagued with these curved corners (not good when you need a hex nut to fit in them). It turns out this is to do with the G64 command in the G-Code which tells the trajectory planner to sacrifice path following accuracy in order to keep the feed rate up (i.e. cut/round corners). A good description is available in the EMC2 documentation section covering trajectory control.

I manually edited my G-code (this one coming from CamBam, but past ones were from Inkscape and dxf2gcode) so that the G64 command now read "G64 P0.001" and the hexagon cut with much sharper corners.

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