Experiencing consistently weird behavior using my z touchplate with Chilipeppr, and my X-carve/grbl. This is a repeatable issue:
Turn on x-carve. Plug USB into laptop. Drag gcode into chilipeppr. Hook up touchplate. Run my touchplate gcode macro:
G20; G38.2 Z-.5 F1; G92 Z.124; G0 z.25
The toolhead travels up, not down…
Run the macro again: Goes up more…
Turn off X-carve, unplug USB.
Repeat the above process: On the 2nd time, it travels down, like it should. Just for fun, during the first try, I’ll change the gcode telling it to send the head up, instead of down (thinking it’s reversing things for some reason) : Still travels up. Nothing I do will make it travel down to touch the plate without a reboot. Any thoughts on that? Thanks!
Do you think it’s Grbl? Or ChiliPeppr? Do the commands in the serial port console look consistent to what you expect? What happens if you do a clean reload of the browser as well and then run?
I have no idea what the culprit is (chipper vs grbl)… stuff is still pretty new to me. I’ll follow up on the rest of your questions tomorrow when I can get back to the machine. But oh, I remembered: If I also don’t refresh the chlilpeppr browser, the same behavior happens (more up, not down).
I"ll also try issuing the commands from some other software, like arduino, and see if the same behavior shows up.
I don’t trust the touch plate widget being used for grbl. Had so many issues with it that I’ve had to stop trusting it. I made a video on my YouTube channel.
Are you using the widget? Or, are you using the widget first then switching to manual commands?
Set your machine zero for Z first in Chilipeppr! I had the same issue with my TinyG! There’s a button for it in the Axes widget, or enter G28.3 Z0 on top of (but not touching) your touchplate, and then it will hopefully go down.
If that solves it, perhaps somebody should tweak that widget to set the zero first. It is possible that there’s a max -z position that the probing will go to and if it hits it, it raises spindle and that’s all you’re seeing.
I don’t know how the grbl reads the axis words, but in TinyG the Zn is always the read as an absolute mZ value. Upon execution, the controller will move to the Zn value. Try Zn = -200 and see if the head moves down.
I don’t use the touchplate widget (honestly, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work). Since I got this gcode working first independently from chilipepper (based on other X-carve users success with it in the forums), I made a Macro in chilipeppr for it. Specifically I send this via the Macros widget:
macro.sendSerial(“G20\n G38.2 Z-.5 F1\n G92 Z.124\n G0 z.25”);
I do execute this first before I do any other homing: I basically home Z on the touchplate, then do X & Y after.
After re-reading the above posts, I think I understand what you’re saying @Andy_Meyer : Manually get the Z close, set it, then run the macro. I’ll be on the machine today and give that a shot.
@Eric_Pavey great! That set of commands is effectively what the touchplate widget does, but I can understand your confusion with it. I’m making a tutorial video on it soon, so maybe that will clear things up. Regardless, let me know what your results are!
@Eric_Pavey great! That set of commands is effectively what the touchplate widget does, but I can understand your confusion with it. I’m making a tutorial video on it soon, so maybe that will clear things up. Regardless, let me know what your results are!
Hey Andy: I know one of the things that made me decide to not use the touchplate widget was it wouldn’t remember my settings: I’d plug in the ‘plate height’ (for example), and next time I used it (after shutting down\reloading my browser), it’d be the default value again. I’ve not used it since, but just wanted to put that out there. Also, all my touchplate settings were in inch, and the widget seemed to only want mm. I could have done a conversion, but that struck me as odd.
So, based on the “zero Z before running touchplate code” concept, I updated my macro like so:
macro.sendSerial(“G20\n G92 Z0\n G38.2 Z-.5 F1\n G92 Z.124\n G0 z.25”);
Now, right after the switch to inch, I do a G92 Z0, and this seems to fix the issue. I’ll go down by default now, no restart required.
Yeah, only downside to that macro is how fleeting G92 is. A lot of folks recommend to never use G92. So, the cool thing would be for the Touch Plate widget to give you a radio button choice of G53 (machine), G54, G55, G56, G92 so you can decide which work coordinate system to zero out.
Hey everyone, thought I’d let you know what the state of things is. I updated the widget and my workspace to reflect the requests that were made. The Super Touchplate widget now supports inch mode, as well as allows you to select your choice of fixture offset (G53-G59.3) and G92, although personally I would not recommend using G92, ever. I can’t test tonight, it is both late and my machine is broken due to recent… issues. If anyone wants to try this out and let me know if it works at all, that would be amazing. From my simulation, I think it’s all good, but I had to teach myself some new G-codes that I hadn’t heard of before, so I don’t really know if it works as intended.
I should mention that with the new changes, I am definitely going to be making a tutorial video, as it is now much more complicated. That said, I have been sick for a week or so and have been unable to do much talking, so I’m waiting until I recover to record a video. My apologies about the delay, I had really hoped to do this sooner.