I have recently bought a second-hand CNC mill. The control system uses Mach3 plus Ethernet SmoothStepper. It came with both a table-mounted tool height setter and a spindle-mounted touch probe - nothing fancy, not exactly Renishaw, but electrically it seems to work OK. The control box has dedicated sockets for both tool-setter and probe, Mach3 is configured (ports and pins) to recognise both devices, and in the "Diagnostics" page you can see both inputs trip when their respective devices are triggered. Mach3 also has the "Probe" input set to the same port and pin as the tool-setter. That all works fine - there are macros for auto toolheight setting on tool change, etc, and that seems OK.

Tonight I was trying to get the probe working. The problem seems to be that both tool-setter and probe macros use G31 for probing (the standard mach3 probe command - nothing surprising there) but of course G31 uses the "Probe" input - and that is set to the tool-setter port/pin. I cannot see how I can use the probe without doing a Mach3 config change to switch the "Probe" input to the probe port/pin - which would be a pain!

Have I missed something here? As the TS and the probe have separate dedicated inputs, I would assume that the system builder intended them to be used simultaneously, but I can't see how to tell Mach3 to use one for TS operations and one for probing. I would be happy to tweak the relevant macros if there is an alernative to G31 to use a different input pin, but I'm not aware of how I could do this.

Any thoughts, guys?

Thanks,