Question UCCNC - Getting the most out of it

As said in earlier threads, UCCNC's instructions are not very clear and I'm sure I'm missing loads of features, so for a starter can anyone shed some light on:

Getting my HF500 controlled
Setting a home/park position (so each time you load the software it remembers these positions)

And finally (for now)

Can I connect this pendant www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CNC-4-Axis-USB-Pendant-Manual-remote-Control-JOG-encoder-for-Mach3-ONLY-/252056624563?hash=item3aafbeddb3 to UCCNC, the advert says Mach 3 only

Looking forward to any answers and further questions.

Hal

Hi again Hal,

I think I can help you out on the spindle control - I have just been throught the excercise on my HF350. I took a screenshot of the best config settings I came up with for relating actual measured spindle no-load speed v G code demand. The results are not very linear, and exposed the fact that my HF350 does not operate below about 6000rpm.







Hope this is of use to you as a starting point, though I doubt if the HF500 has the same chacteristics as the HF350.

Peter

Many thanks Peter,

I will give go this afternoon

Hal

If the pendant acts like a keyboard, you can map each key to a function in UCCNC. If it acts like a controller, you can map it to keys with a free software and then map it with UCCNC.

A cheap "pendant" that will work easily would be an external wired or wireless keypad like this:

Brilliant! I now have control of my spindle - many thanks Peter

Hal,

That's excellent - does your spindle bottom out at around 6000rpm like mine? If it is different, just tweak the min speed parameter to get the best correlation between the S code value and your minimum.

Peter

Hi Peter,

Yes it seems to be the same as yours, I had a slight issue of UCCNC turning off the spindle when it moved onto the part of the job. I'm sure this is me not really understanding what is going on with UCCNC but certainly the machine is becoming 'one unit' now.

Hal