Software for Gen 6 board as CNC

Hello all,
I am very new to the world of reprap but am an engineer so I decided to attempt to build my own 3d printer / cnc machine. I already had an existing mini mill from Taig Tools so I figured it would be more cost effective, a good learning experience, and overall a better end product once completed by modifying the mini mill to become a cnc / 3d printer. My overall end goal is to have a machine in which I can swap out the head to either be an extruder or a cutter therefore making it able to do both cnc and 3d printing. For my initial project I will focus on making it a cnc machine first to see if I can get that far.

I researched and got some nema 23 motors with the right parameters for what i need, a gen6 printer board, some mounts for the motors, and the appropriate wiring. I have all the motors mounted, wired to the gen6 board, have an old computer power supply hooked up to run the thing, and hooked to my computer (windows) to drive it.

Now is where I need some help. I have tried various software out there to try and run it but haven't had much success. I am using Marlin firmware currently and have tried using Pronterface, Mach3, and a few other free software but none of them "see" my gen6 board except for Pronterface. Pronterface sees it fine however complains that the thermistors aren't hooked up and then errors, stopping any movement. I realize that this is because Pronterface is used for 3d printing and since I don't have an extruder I don't have that part hooked up to the board. Perhaps I need to hook something up to the board so that it will bypass the error? Even if I do bypass that error for Pronterface, I still need some kind of software that will work with driving it for cnc work and not 3d printing.

So overall my questions are if anyone has any experience in using the gen6 boards for cnc work and if so which software / firmware did you use? Secondly, did you need to do anything to bypass missing an extruder at all?

Thank you for your time and help.

Often thought about converting my reprap to do CNC milling but never got round to it.
The only thing i recall is that Skeinforge has settings for CNC milling. I was put off by all the settings when it comes to 3D printing but i distinctly remember seeing it while delving into it . Might have been when i was looking at Sfact as a simplified front end for Skeinforge
Worth taking a look

I don't think the software you've tried has a problem with the Gen6 its probably the firmware ( in your case Marlin ) that it doesn't "see". Despite being old technology, baud rates still trip us all up at some stage


Good luck

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2013 01:58PM by bigfilsing.

Thank you for your response. I can try Skeinforge once I am home. Would this supposedly work with my Merlin firmware do you think? Also do you think it would "ignore" not having an extruder?

yes i believe so. To be honest other than changing the Marlin config.h file and uploading it to my Gen6d board im a little out of my knowledge depth on additional variables.
Should be easy to try out thou

Hopefully a more knowledgeable friend will kick in with some advice. I doubt your the first to try this so there has to be a way

Cheers

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2013 02:03PM by bigfilsing.

For anyone else who has viewed this topic.. I am now using Repetier to control my CNC build. This works very well. To make sure that the gen6 board's temperature sensors aren't tripped, I hooked up the thermistors to pins 1 and 2 of both the extruder and heated bed pin layouts.

Hi, one Question ,
Do you have the ordenary Gen6 (not Deluxe)? Is there a thermistor input for heat bed?

I want to add a heat bed into my plotter. would be OK if I could not control but see the values...

Best Regards

Dirk

I just have the standard. There are two pin outs which make me think extruder and hearted print bed so i think it would support it indirectly. I don't use either at this time since I'm using it as a cnc for the time being. I'm not sure if the heated bed could be hooked up directly to be powered from the gen 6 board or if a relay would be used.