Using NCPlot with the Mach machine control software

[titchener]

I found out about NCPlot from seeing it mentioned on the Yahoo forum for the Mach machine control software.

I would like to use NCPlot with Mach, and Mach lets you select NCPlot as the editor started when you click the "Edit G Code" button. However, when you click the button the NCPlot editor starts up, but its not automatically loaded with the current G code program shown in Mach, as is the case when the default Notepad editor is set as the editor to use.

I'm assuming that Mach calls the selected editor with an argument of the file to open for editing, does NCPlot not support that way of starting the program and automatically loading the file?

Is it possible to enhance NCPlot to allow integrated operation with Mach, there are a lot of Mach users like me who would probably be interested in purchasing NCPlot if the programs worked well together.

Thanks,

Paul T.

[scottmartinez]

Paul,

I haven't used Mach so I can't say for sure what's going on. NCPlot does support passing a file to it through the command line, so I would have to look at Mach to see how it is passing the file. Currently, you can drag and drop a file onto the NCPlot icon to open it, or you can also drop it onto an open edit window.

I'll look more closely at this and see if I can make it work.

Thanks,
Scott

[titchener]

Thanks for the quick response Scott. If you can get NCPlot to work as the default editor with Mach I'll put a post mentioning that on the Mach forum and I'll sure you'll get some sales (including mine), NCPlot complements Mach really nicely. By the way the guy that develops Mach is really nice guy and I'm sure he would quickly answer any questions you have about getting the programs to work together, you can get in contact with him at www.artofcnc.com .

Paul T.

[scottmartinez]

Paul,

I've been looking into this issue and the short answer is it's caused by a problem in Mach. So I asked about this on the Mach forums and Mike came up with a solution. The workaround is to use the DOS short version of the pathname, which is:

"C:\PROGRA~1\NCPLOT\NCPLOT.EXE"

Thanks,
Scott

[titchener]

Thanks, that works.

Paul T.