candle2 cam software

Genmitsu CNC machines used to be delivered with Candle CAM (computer aided manufacturing) software. Now they're delivered with the Universal Gcode Sender. Candle used to be better, but ran only on Windows. I found the source code for it here and tried to contact its author to see if he would adapt it for Linux, but he (who is/was Russian) has disappeared. So I hunted for and found a slightly improved forked version of Candle called Candle2 and forked it. Candle2 still has quite a few weaknesses, including not running on Linux, but more frustratingly, it does not know how to initialize a specific brand of CNC router like my Genmitsu 4030XL. This has led to such problems as the spindle motor not starting when a program is running which has caused the motionless bit to crash into the workpiece. More than once. Rather than bother its author, and because I know what I want better than I could explain to someone else, I decided to fix it myself. This may have been a mistake.

This project's goal is to fix at least the initialization problem, and make the source code more maintainable.

MARCH 6 2023 According to Patrick keeping humidity at just the right level is a thing, so I guess the first step is to get a fan (or 10), get an Arduino development kit set up (on Linux of course), and figure out how to turn the damn thing (the fan) on and off with the Arduino.