As with the main GUI, the plasma screen is designed to be used with a touch screen and is thus optimized for touch
It can however be used with keyboard and mouse
The plasma screen has been included in the latest master branch. It can be found under the sim directory. You will be required to copy all the relevant files to your config. More on this later.
Plasma operations on CNC machines is a bit of an orphan process. When cutting metal with a flame, the uneven heating up of the metarial will cause the sheet to bend and buckle. To start with, most sheets of metal does not come out of the mill or press in a very even or flat state. Thick sheets (30mm plus) can be out of plane as much as 50mm to 100mm. Most CNC gcode programs will start from a know reference or a piece of stock that has a know size and shape. Gcode is written to rough the excess of and finally cut the finished part. With plasma the unknown state of the sheet makes it impossible to generate gcode that will cater for these variances in the material.For this reason the THC ( Torch Height Control ) concept was designed. More detail on THC later in the document. The purpose of the THC function is to make sure that the torch remains at a certain height above the work piece. Not having gcode to do this, one has to interject somewhere in the control loop to get the Z axis to track the material height. By nature of this statement it is clear that plasma and THC does not adhere to the rules for normal CNC and has to be treated with caution.
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