3018Pro

3018 Mill

I recently purchased a 3018 Pro mill to learn a bit about CNC milling (ironically its my second mill, I have a tiny Roland mill that I was going to use for PCB milling but ended up having too many software issues with). The intention was to mill some trivial PCBs, a bit of signage and perhaps some laser engraving.

So I purchased a basic 3018 pro with a laser module.

Some key learnings emerged (spoiler alert there is still a long way to go) Read More...

Building a Mac OS X version of Candle GRBL controller application with G-Code visualizer written in Qt

As a new owner of a 3018 Pro Milling machine using a GRBL 1.1 controller I needed a program to download G-Code to the CNC Mill.

Windows / Linux users have a few choices including:

While UGS (Universal GCode Platform) does run on Macs, it is Java based and feels a bit resource intensive. So I tried building Candle and it is a fairly easy compile as the developer has done most of the work.

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