Rotary support?

MillMage Software Questions
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1

Hi MillMage team,

someone from the Snapmaker forum mentioned the existence of this new project, and I’m thrilled and looking forward!

That said, I’m surprised nobody asked this yet (at least search does not yield results): Will MillMage at some point support 4 axis/rotary modules? I installed the preview and it does not yet offer a setup for this as far as I could tell.

If you plan to support this: Can you already indicate which operations would be supported? Would it be “only” indexed machining, X/Z/A milling, or full X/Y/Z/A milling? My excitement would not know limits if you’d go for the full XYZA approach!

Thanks!

2

The MillMage documentation states that it’s planned, but no further details are provided.

There’s a lot of anticipation for 4th-axis machining—fingers crossed it arrives soon!

3

In our plans going forward, we will likely support 3rd axis, like X/A/Z or Y/Z/A, not there just yet. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
4

+1 for requesting Rotary attachment or cnc routerlathe support

5

Since it is 2.5d software, primarily intended for signage, I would not expect full XYZA - The path planning for that is very complicated, and we don’t even support 3D models (yet). Beyond that, no specific plans have been made. Rotary is much less common than XYZ gantry machines, and we want to get the basics right first.

6

But you’ve got XZA rotary working in Lightburn. Could Millmage work in the same way please

7

I’m sure we’ll have rotary functionality at some point in the future - when that is, I can’t say, right now we’ve just launched MillMage, and are focused on adding features for the largest groups of users. We’ll get there, give us time.

In the meantime, make your feature requests here: https://millmage.fider.io/

8

Do you own 4th axis hardware?

  • I own a rotary axis
  • I only have 3 axis
0 voters
9

The “bit” in LightBurn can be considered to be infinitely thin, and doesn’t deal with depth at all, certainly not in the way milling software needs to - It’s more like we have X/A in LightBurn, and it’s only ever doing surface engraving.

We could potentially support it for “shallow engraving” only, but a flat carve wrapped around a cylinder isn’t a flat carve anymore if you go relatively deep. It’s not as simple as you’re making it out to be.

If you think it is, go ahead and change the GCode generator to just emit A instead of Y and try it for yourself. :slight_smile: