Mach3 Screen 4 Fixed Download
Ninfa Cappasola
That is correct Sir, never messed with Mach3 until about 3 months ago when I ordered my crossfire, most of the credit goes to one of the users at machsupport forum that showed me the code to use for what I wanted. I was able to do some of it myself by downloading and looking at other screensets that people had posted.
As Donald mentioned if you click either MDI Alt2 button or ToolPath Alt4 will change the view and have the Toolpath screen larger but these are completely different views. You can always create your own view as well. ToolJunkie from here and on YouTube created a custom view that he shared as well.
You should design your screen using the target resolution of your CNC Controller monitor for best looking results. NOTE: the Mach3 Menu line and the Windows Task bar take up valuable room on your screen. You can autohide the windows task bar, but you will still have the Mach3 title bar and menu. This will push your screen design down. Make sure you account for this.
Not me. I chose to make just the one screen I want. If I want to access other features, I am just going to jump back to the stock Mach screenset called 1024. If I seem to be using a specific feature a lot, I will just add it to my own screen.
I really liked CNCZone member ger21's Aqua screen set, both because it looks a lot crisper and more modern than the default 1024.set screens, and also because I think the real estate is better organized and better suited to a touch screen I'll eventually start using. Gerry's out of the box screen set is pretty darned good, but was missing a couple of my favorite features, so I set about making a few mods to it for my own purposes. BTW, it is particularly nice not to have to create a screen design from scratch. Modifying gerry's is much easier! Also, don't hesitate to watch the excellent tutorial videos on the Artsoft support site. Thanks Gerry for doing all the heavy lifting!
I get a lot of mileage out of jogging by steps and being able to cycle through the step sizes. This is especially true since I got the idea from Hoss to set up Mach3 to include a half thou (0.0005") step size. Changing the list of jog step increments is easy. Just go to the Config menu and select "General Config". The list is right on that screen. I had no use for the larger increments, so my list looks like this:
And I repeat the same values a second time. Most of the time I like to use 0.0005, so it's convenient that Mach3 remembers which one you selected last. The original Aqua screen set lacked a way to step through the jog increments (it's on the jog fly-out, which is missing), so I added a button to do this.
I decided to give the MachStdMill Mach3 screen set a try. This is the new look and feel that the yet to be released Mach4 will have. They decided to make a version available for Mach3 to get some early feedback and to lower the learning curve when Mach4 is released.
The screens have a much more work flow feel to them. Things are consistently arranged and are on the correct page when you need them. I have tried a bunch of the screen sets on the Mach forums in the past. Typically, I just scratch the surface of what Mach3 can do for my routing and laser requirements so, just about any screen set is going to work for me. I often changed just to get a new look for a while. This, though, has a totally different feel to it. I like it and it should definitely make a usability and productivity improvement.
A couple of times now I've come here with questions as I, with no programming experience whatsoever, was tasked with making a new six-axis mach3 screenset. I've come a long way and am so far pretty pleased. However, as I'm bringing the screenset into mach3 proper for coding and testing, I'm running into issues.
Second, I have several buttons on screen which require macro or VB scripting. Being that most of these buttons do the exact same thing that they did in the 5-axis screen I based a lot of my work around, I literally copy/pasted the VB scripting from the editor from one to the other. I know these codes do work. If I run the code within the VB script editor, it works.
Here's how I've been entering in the code. After opening/loading the screenset, I go to Operator -> edit button script, and select the button I want to edit (say my "open record file" button). I retype the code for that exact button in the working 5-axis screen into the VB-script editor in mach. Same spacing, capitalization, everything. I will then go to the VB-script file option and choose save before closing out. It saves it as that hiddenscript.m1s, which I've read elsewhere is just a placeholder in the mach macro folder and that the code is supposed to be saved into your screenset. I do this then "Save Settings" from the Mach Config menu.
However, the button I just assigned the code does not work. It acts as though it has no code to it. I will get an error that there's no code. If I close mach and open it again, ALL of the code I put in is deleted and replaced with "None". It does this on every single VB-script button. The method I entered it in is exactly what was described as correct procedure in the official machsupport forum, but I can't get it to actually save to my screenset.
Lastly, I want to add a couple of intelligent labels. Other mach screens have intelligent labels that will tell you things like the name of the loaded file or the last error status. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out the correct scripting for these labels in Mach. I can set them up as userlabels and make them read a line of text I type in, but I can't make it tell me the name of my file or other system label things.
Why bother, when instead I could be watching the 65-inch, wide-screen, front-projection, HDTV-ready Toshiba television with top-of-the-line, double-drawer DVD player? I bought it online during this experiment (at consumer-direct.com, TV and DVD: retail: $7,499; shipping: $189; final cost: $5,470).
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