Question about Z touchplates, Chilipeppr, & GRBL (X-carve) :
I’ve done two-part cuts (rough, toolchange, finish) successfully in the past. Thought I’d do some testing in that area today, and it all quickly fell apart. I haven’t upgraded the grbl firmware in way since I’ve done this in the past, and I’m exporting my gcode the same.
The issue is, after I do the toolchange and re-zero Z using a touchplate & macro in Chilipeppr, when I go to restart the print, the toolhead flies off to the right of the machine, and I have to hit the e-stop. This has never happened before.
After much testing, I think I finally narrowed it down: When I export my gcode from MeshCAM, I use the ‘Shapeoko GRBL-mm’ postprocessor. When I go to re-zero my Z-axis, this is the Macro I execute:
macro.sendSerial(“G20\n G92 Z0\n G38.2 Z-.5 F1\n G92 Z.124\n G0 z.25”);
The first thing it does it set it to inches.
But I’ve always exported my gcode in mm, and always zeroed Z in inches.
If I leave it in inches before I unpause, I get the "X-axis tries to escape from the machine’ issue. But if I enter a G21 before I unpause, it works ok. Again, never had to do this before.
I seem to have a few solutions: Either change my macro to work in mm, change it back to mm after the macro (or the last cmd in the macro), or export from MeshCAM using an inch postprocessor and just work in inches the whole time.
Maybe this is an obvious question, but is there a preferred way I should be exporting \ zeroing Z?
Also, I still can’t use the built-in ‘Touch Plate’ widget in Chilipeppr: While it goes through the motions of zeroing Z, it actually doesn’t zero it at all (nor respect the entered touchplate height), it doesn’t seem to change the Z value after touch.