Hi,
I've being using Mach3 for several year now, and lately I'm trying my hand at cutting 3d images.
I have a project right now on-going, I cut the roughthing toolpath took (about 7 hours) and I am trying to cut the finish toolpath (about 70 hours, 1/32 tapered bit about 6.7 million line of code).
I load the file, takes a while for it to load, when I try to start cycle, Mach3 is not responding.
My Pc is stand alone, running windows XP.
Hence my question is there a limit to number a g-code line Mach3 will accept and if so how can I split the lines in notepad to stop and start if I divide the lines in several parts?

Any help would be appreciated   
T.Y.

Hi,
there is no line limit for a licenced copy of Mach3. A Demo copy has a 500 line limit.

In Mach4 there is a six minute runtime limit with a Demo copy and no limit when licenced.

With large files such as you are running it can take a long time for Mach to do the initial draw.....minutes or longer.
With Mach3 redraws are also extended and often result in a machine stall because the redraw steals too many CPU cycles
and Mach starves.

May I suggest turning the toolpath display off and see how it goes. It will at the very least tell you whether the graphics are
causing the fault.

The initial draw in Mach4 is also processor intensive and can take a while depending on the power of the PC, the installed memory
and the graphics card if any. Thereafter the redraws are very much less intensive than Mach3 and a redraw in Mach4 is not likely to
cause a stall.

Craig

Hi joeaverage,
Thank you for your reply. Dumb question how do you turn off toolpath display?
Do you know if the g-code file can be seperated in multiple files to reduce the rendering?

Hi,
try the Diagnostics Tab.

Craig

Great,
Will try that

Merci.from Quebec,Canada

Hi Craig
Tried your trick and it work perfectly, it did take 14 minutes to upload the code but that's fine.
Have a great holiday season.
Ray

Hi,
there is no line limit for a licenced copy of Mach3.

Actually, I think it's 10 million lines.

As you've seen, Mach3's toolpath display does not deal with large files well.
I turn it off for any files over 250,000 lines.

Hi Gerry,

Actually, I think it's 10 million lines.

Now that you mention it I do recall a limit being mentioned for Mach3.

I had a thread going on the Mach4 board and smurph made reference to 3d files of up to 100 million lines!
The biggest file I've ever run is 5 million lines, a PCB routing file. On the little dual core Atom PC I use to run my machine
it takes about 4 minutes to load the file and draw the toolpath. Once it has drawn the toolpath it seems fine thereafter.
Exactly how the toolpath generation differs between Mach4 and Mach3 I don't know. It seems once the first draw is done
Mach4 runs very much more smoothly and no need to turn the toolpath off.

I can load the same 5 million line file on my i7 laptop, itself quite dated, 8G Ram,2GHz CPU in about 30 seconds including the
initial toolpath draw. Just goes to show that a more powerful PC speeds up the load/initial draw. Interestingly the much more
powerful PC (i7 laptop) performs no differently, that I can tell anyway, to the Atom once the toolplath is running.

Craig