Some time ago, my friend Cristian started a job: a montessori bed for the son of our friend Teresa, Giulio.
I have decided to complete the nice work of Cristian with a name plate CNC crafted, quite a challenge because a big size of the object would have been 200 x 80 mm and i have only a small desktop CNC, the FABtotum personal fabricator.
After some “dry run” tests in order to check the real travel limit of X axis, i done the job with success.
Now, the GCODE is available, Makercam has produced the GCODE for GRBL parser but i have a Marlin derived CNC (3DPrinter firmware derived), the FABtotum Personal Fabricator. I've written a GCODE post processor that eliminate the weird behaviour (caused from not understanded GCODEs) and optimize the working speed, accelerating the travels.
It's called MakerCAM2FABtotum and it's available on GitHub.
For processing the produced gcode, for example you can do:
# ./post_process.sh input.gcode 12000
And the script produce an optimized GCODE with a configured spindle speed @ 12000 RPM.
Now you can then load the _postprocessed.gcode files into the FABtotum object manager and use it for milling.
I have run the cutout only GCODE for first in order to check if the tool can do the work for the entire width of the machine without triggering the limit switches; the cutout job is the largest job, the other job may go well.
It's a Linux bash script but you can run it also in Windows, watch the following video for a quick tutorial.