Denford Software & Machines

Mid East Ohio Career Center purchased the PCB engraver. First of all the documentation is insufficient. These are electronics instructors not cnc operators. To take them through a so called tutorial and then say make it the way you would any CNC program in not right.

We have tried every way we can think of but we are never able to try and make a board. We have loaded the sample files and they are always RED. Do you have anything that takes it step by step to make a board.

The tutorial you're referring to is fairly generic, and was written with the PCB creation software we were evaluating at the time, and covers how we got it to create .gerber files suitable for the PCB import wizard in VR Milling 5.
It has been shipped with the PCB Engravers because it should help to configure whichever PCB software people happen to be using, and the gerber import wizard in the PCB engraver software is exactly the same as the one in VR Milling 5.

The QuickStart guide for the PCB Engraver aims to cover all the basics of getting a CNC file into the machine and manufactured. If you find it lacks enough information to get started, then please advise how it can be improved.

I'm guessing that all the CNC files you are loading are in RED because, as it states in the QuickStart guide (latest copy attached), A red LED indicates that the program cannot fit into the working area (i.e. anywhere to the right and above the current DATUM position).
If you have not set the Datum position yet, then none of the programs will fit into the working area...

HTH

How?

From the quickstart guide:

2. Click Home to initialise the axes.
3. Click Jog to allow manual movement of the axes.
4. Using the keyboard arrow keys for XY and PageUp/PageDown for Z, jog the tool to the bottom left corner of the material.
5. Click the 3 DATUM set buttons next to the position readouts.