One heck of an awesome ChiliPeppr, TinyG, and 3040 CNC setup.
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=A5PJ8jXvfq0&u=/watch?v%3DIn9Q_R0Nui8%26feature%3Dshare
Wow! Awesome! I remember talking to him about the blow XMEGA. Great work! I love it.
Normally z=0 would be the top of the piece being machined (and you made it be the top of the spoilboard or the bottom of the piece being machined), and a negative z will cut into the material. Positive z is nornally considered ok to mve without hitting anything.
I suspect that’s why you’re getting moves like you are.
Thanks John! Any chance there is an easy way to add the ability to directly edit the coordinates while doing offsets? Like if you have a 1/4" end mill and touch off the part instead of zeroing, moving over .125 and zeroing again, just entering -.125 in the coordinate box? I’d try to code that myself but I’m not really familiar with javascript.
Dave, I think you are right - or at least that makes sense. I remember reading or seeing a suggestion that you zero off your spoilboard when you don’t have a perfectly flat part surface because the spoilboard is known to be flat. Maybe that’s a bad idea after all?
@Chris_DePrisco I think that’s a great idea although there was somebody else requesting that an edit of the coordinate would actually move to that absolute position instead. So it sounds like there’s 2 competing ideas for what editing the coordinates would do. Maybe after editing and hitting enter you are asked what action you want:
- Move to this absolute position
- Move to this relative position
- Set offset for G54 layer (or G55, etc depending on active WCS)
- Set offset for machine coordinates
I know in Mach, it just changes the offset. I’m not sure whether it was machine or work coords, probably machine, since I didn’t have limit switches and never used G54 before.
Currently, if I want to set the coordinates of the current position, so far the only way I’ve found to do this in ChiliPeppr is to issue the appropriate gcode command in the gcode sender window.
When I zero my Z for example, I normaly use a feeler gauge and would like to set the current Z to the thickness of my feeler gauge, and there isn’t anyway todo that. Similarly, if I use an edge finder, once I’ve picked up the edge it would be nice to set the coordinates to be negative half the diameter of the edge finder.
It might make sense to mimic Mach then as the default option. TinyG tends to just put you in G54 automatically, so it could be that layer the offset is done against. However, I’ve taken the position historically to just do everything in machine coordinates in ChiliPeppr since the maker community tends to only use/care about machine coords. There is a new widget coming out soon from a user named Danal that added the work coordinate system capabilities, so it’s getting fancier and sadly maybe a bit more confusing.
John, as far as I’ve ever seen entering the coordinate in the display box always updates the axis position to that value. I’d vote that this is the default behavior and if you want to add the other functionality I’d make a button to do so. I would like to be able to move to a coordinate like that, it’s just that’s not the expected behavior for most users of Mach, Tormach, etc.
Hmm. Ok. I tend to think that moving to that absolute position (not relative) is what most users would expect as default. I will give a fly-out menu when you start editing that shows you what operation is going to happen. It will always jump back to the default on enter key.
@Michael_Jacobsen It was just a used piece from work, probably from Parker. Look up “pneumatic distribution manifold” there are several similar ones on eBay.
I’ll do that. Thanks.
I wrote a custom post for Fusion360 to take care of the “Z” issue. It’s got a configurable parameter for the safe Z. It should work for TinyG as well - but I have a GRBL Shield.
http://www.restrictedayerspace.net/cnc/autodesk-fusion-360-cam-post-processor-for-shapeoko/
Cool, I’ll take a look!