Newbie looking at 6040 (China CNC) for polypropylene 15mm sheet

[JOGARA]

Zeeflyboy, any suggestions on where to start with the TPA-2?

Not been given any docs other than this;
http://kurokesu.com/main/2015/12/30/...robe-to-mach3/

[Zeeflyboy]

I'm afraid I don't use the same motion controller as you, nor do I use Mach3 anymore... but it should be fairly straight forwards.

Hook it up to the same point that the normal probe goes to, but you just need to go to the ports and pins part to invert the signal mach is looking for as it's a normally closed circuit vs normally open. If you flip over to the diagnostics page of mach you should then be able to see the probe input trigger as you press on the probe tip.

It is definitely worth spending a couple of minutes dialing in the probe tip using a dial indicator before each use - the runout of the spindle/collets results in me getting anything up to around 0.1mm of runout all the way down at the tip which will affect any probing results. Within a couple of minutes of careful tweaking I can get that down to less than 0.01mm

As for probing on mach3 - I've never done it. I think there were some screen sets for mach3 that have probing built in, or you could write a small macro to do it (or use someone else's) but the info is out there if you have a look. Mach4 makes things quite simple with a dedicated probing section built in so I've never had to figure anything out in that regard.

[JOGARA]

I'm afraid I don't use the same motion controller as you, nor do I use Mach3 anymore... but it should be fairly straight forwards.

Hook it up to the same point that the normal probe goes to, but you just need to go to the ports and pins part to invert the signal mach is looking for as it's a normally closed circuit vs normally open. If you flip over to the diagnostics page of mach you should then be able to see the probe input trigger as you press on the probe tip.

It is definitely worth spending a couple of minutes dialing in the probe tip using a dial indicator before each use - the runout of the spindle/collets results in me getting anything up to around 0.1mm of runout all the way down at the tip which will affect any probing results. Within a couple of minutes of careful tweaking I can get that down to less than 0.01mm

As for probing on mach3 - I've never done it. I think there were some screen sets for mach3 that have probing built in, or you could write a small macro to do it (or use someone else's) but the info is out there if you have a look. Mach4 makes things quite simple with a dedicated probing section built in so I've never had to figure anything out in that regard.

Thanks for the info. The probe does look a tad off from stock. I forgot to get a dial indicator >.<

Trying out the ProbeIt plugin that creates a wizard to probe. It has tools like auto calibrate. Uses a known diameter though and I don't know if I got anything for that :/
Trying to think what I can get that is large enough but not going to break the bank...

[Zeeflyboy]

in reality you probably don't need to calibrate it.... if probing the inside of a hole for example, everything is relative so you will still find centre of the hole even if the measured dimensions were off.

Calibration is more of interest if you were measuring things for verification purposes.

[JOGARA]

0.03mm is the best I have gotten so far.
Finding it quite hard to get it any closer :/




Is there a way to get Mach3 to move a single step? 0.01mm is a couple steps on the stepper from the looks of it.
And how accurate is the mm readout in the interface? I would rather it move to the nearest 0.01mm rather than this...