Rewinding or fast forwarding in Mach3

Software Mach3
1

Is it possible to rewind or fast forward through the g-code that’s been loaded into Mach3? In the event that something happens like the torch doesn’t fire etc…

2

We have had issues with the torch not firing in the middle of a project and needed to back-up as well. I wasn’t able to figure it out so I turned the plasma off and re-ran the program then paused it right where it left off, turned the plasma back on, and it finished the project.

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3

Sometimes the simple solution is better than the “correct” one. You could burn an hour of your life minutes trying to get to the correct line in thousands of lines of G-code so you could restart at the right place. (Don’t ask me how I know.)

Or go with the less sophisticated approach that gets the job done in only a few minutes. Clever solution :blush:

4

Figured it out. If it loses the arc

  1. Stop feed and hit f5 to make sure Mach3 stops trying to fire the torch.

  2. Click on the g-code dialogue box and use the arrow keys to figure out where on your cut you are. The drawing at the top right will show small highlights of where in the cut it is, so you’ll have an idea. I usually go back far enough. And you’ll see a “run from here button” which whichever line of code your on.

  3. Hit start and a dialogue box will pop up, exit out, hit start again with your finger on f5 to fire the torch again when the program gets to where your arc extinguished.

I’m sure there’s other ways to do this, but this is just how I figured to do it. Seems to work well for me

5

The run from here is a valuable tool if you know where you left off. If you press the stop button it should give the line of code it was on and then you can type that number and select run from here. Not so much anymore in my case.

So in my setup I have the plasma machine sending a torch ok signal to the controller. If the plasma doesn’t fire then the machine won’t move. So I just press my e stop button and everything shuts down. The problem I was having was it I tried the “run from here” solution with a z axis that would probe, the program would stop at every probe point but never move and my z axis would go haywire. So the solution that is easiest for me is when the e stop button is pressed I write down the highlighted “Nxxx” line number from the g code window. This is the line it was on when I stopped it. Usually a M3 command. Open the code in notepad, find the “Nxxx” line number and delete everything from the last M5 command to the beginning of the code (besides the first 2 lines of code), save it as a new file and run that in mach 3. Feels like it’s faster then doing the run from here option, at least in my case.

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6

What I found out after some research (and it’s worked every time for me so far) is to back up to the last M5 command using the gcode window then clicking “set next line” simply click the green button and it will start from there. You can also start from the middle of a long cut by selecting a gcode line say in the middle of that cut before your torch stopped or you stopped it. For me at least it will jump to that spot and start running the torch over the same cut without firing. I simply hit f5 as the torch is approaching where it previously stopped and I get a nice clean restart to my cut.

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