Probe XYZ Widget for Tinyg So,

CAD & CAM Tool Chain ChiliPeppr
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Probe XYZ Widget for Tinyg

So, I’ve been working on just kind of a fun little project for no real reason. Just doing some little ‘coins’ and I wanted to be able to engrave images on both sides. I quickly found out that reliably positioning things to do that was not as easy as it sounds. So then I figured what I need is a way to hold my workpiece and to be able to accurately figure out where the center of that piece is.

Once I started playing with the touch plate widget I was hooked on using that to be able to find the zero of the z axis, and decided I needed something just like that for the X and Y.

I had seen some other info on the web on how to do it, so figured it couldn’t be that hard.

So this is what I came up with. Just got done testing it and it seems to find the edges of that little aluminum corner block just fine.

It was really fun working with the Chilipeppr system and I really appreciate how easy it was to fork the touch plate widget, edit it and get another widget working.

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Nice! Can u explain how it works?

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So, I used the code from the touchplate widget that does the probing for the Z zero. The probing code works exactly the same for the X and Y and uses the same Zmin connection. On my machine, I have X going along the long axis, and Y going across the gantry.

I set the origin to be the center of my workpiece. In the above picture, that would be the center of the 2" wide aluminum bar. Since the end result will eventually be a circle, assume the workpiece is 2" square.

The angle touch block is offset 2" to the left and 2" down from the center of the workpiece.

That means in the ‘offset’ field I would enter 2" for x, 2" for Y, and .775" for Z, which is the thickness of the touchplate. In practice, since I’m working with Aluminum, I’ve been touching off of the workpiece itself and just setting the Z offset to 0.

I then jog the bit over to being just above the angle touch plate, and press run. It will then run until it touchs the plate and then set the y zero to the value of the offset. I then jog a little to the right, and down, and do the X. Then jog over to the workpiece and set the Z-zero.

So now I’ve got a way to accurately and repeatedly set the 0,0,0 to the center of my workpiece without having to hunch over my machine and squint.

I can also remove my spoil board for other projects, put it back on and still find the same zero.

I also added the ability for this to work in inches and metric, and it saves all the values via localstorage, same as the touchplate widget.