I’m new to CNC, but strong in software dev. Hence Chilipeppr looks really enticing. I just finished my Shapeoko 2 build and am in the tuning phase.
The most confusing aspect to me is that ChiliPeppr doesn’t treat the lower left as 0,0, and instead has an origin that is in the middle (kinda like PostScript). I think I can work with this, but given that limit and home switches don’t specify the middle of an axis, I wondered if I was misunderstanding something. How would one use ChiliPeppr along with tinyg and home/limit switches?
Thanks!
Kevin, ChiliPeppr tries to show the extents of your Gcode in the 3D Viewer, which is what I believe you’re referring to. Some people do their Gcode with 0,0 in the center like if they’re milling a gear. Some folks use lower left as 0,0 like when doing a PCB. However, when doing the bottom of a PCB people make 0,0 the lower right. So, ChiliPeppr must be agnostic, thus it just zooms to your extents and lets you figure out your 0,0 when you generate your Gcode. So, this may be more of a question for your CAM software than anything.
Thanks for the fast response John! So, for instance with the initial logo workspace which has a central origin, how do I know where to home the machine? Just jog to approximate center???
If you don’t have home/limit switches then yes, that is one approach. Some people consider that the lazy approach, but I use it all the time. I visually jog to center of machine then I hit the “Zero Out” which issues a G28.3 X0 Y0 Z0 which forcibly sets your 0,0,0 as machine coordinates (as if that’s what your limit switches set).
Many folks would recommend to just use a G92 offset. So, you could visually jog your machine to the center. Then there’s a little pulldown next to the X Y Z coordinates in the Axes widget. There’s an option to Zero Out using G92 for each axis. Do that for the X and Y after you jog your machine to the center and you’ll have an offset that works for milling the ChiliPeppr logo, but hasn’t messed with your machine coordinates. Figure out the Z position of your work piece and jog visually to just at the top surface. Then G92 zero out the Z axis. Now you have XYZ all set for milling using the G92 layer. Your machine coordinates are nice and safe still. Turn off G92 by issuing a G92.1 command in the Serial Port Console.
The other way would be for you to create a G55 layer that represents the dead-center of your machine, but I’ll let somebody else answer that question.
OK, I think I got it … thanks again!
BTW, my favorite way to jog now is to hold down the Ctrl key in the 3D Viewer and move the little toolhead to the spot I want to jog and then click the mouse/touchpad button. Each grid unit is 10mm (if in mm mode).