Installed LW4 after my brief relationship with LW3. Things are going swimmingly, up until I try to generate GCode for my little test design, a simple SVG and a basic, single-tone alphanumeric character in BMP.
When I click the generate button, nothing appears to happen. When I click the View button to see what code it generated, it gives me what I think is just standard Start and End code: G21 G90 M2.
Am I missing something (probably), or is it a bug?
If you haven’t please go to http://cncpro.co and read a couple of the examples on how to prepare operations with LW4. I also made a video this week you will find it by browsing the community.
Ahh… That’s UI confusion on my part. I didn’t understand why it was asking me to do that since I had already loaded the documents in LW. Maybe “Drag documents here when you’re ready to cut/engrave them.”?
Yeah, but my SVG file saved with all the layers I had, even the ones that were hidden at the time (for some reason), so I had to expand the bar to see all the layers and re-hide them in LW. But I don’t think I would have understood why it was asking me that no matter how obvious the box was. I had seen the notification before moving the bar down, I just didn’t know why it seemed to still be asking me to drop files in when I’d already done so.
So, my stumble through continues. I moved those down to the next section, and configured the jobs. I was then able to generate GCode and then review the job using the (amazingly handy) simulator.
The SVG path looks good enough (though parts of it started turning green and I’m not sure why).
It appears to have ignored the BMP. I think it’s because it doesn’t have a transparent background.
Wow, I didn’t know that bar for the bottom operations panel was draggable. Learned something new. That makes things a lot easier from my perspective
The Red & Green in the simulation are related to G0 & G1 moves. I believe G0 moves are “laser off, machine moving” & G1 are “laser on, machine moving”. Or vice versa, I could have it backwards.
So the Green/Red you see are just again a simulation of the path & you can see where it will be moving with the laser on or off.
Regarding the BMP, you need to drag it’s document into the operations panel also & create a Laser Raster operation (with whatever settings you need). It should generate all Operations you have in that bottom panel into the final Gcode.
Ok first. You have 2 type of files so you need 2 operations In the section bellow. Svg I http://assume.will be cut or light vector engrave, and the other raster. So apply each file the respective operation. Mind that the order in which they are is the order they will be executed, so if you need to change press the small up/down arrows.
The purple dot is actually an indication of the “tool” (either where the laser beam will be or the spindle or whatever). When you run the job you will see that purple dot (which is actually the top of a 3D Conical shape) moving to indicate the machine’s current “head” position.