New Autoleveling PCB software

[C_Bubba]

Daedelus,
Thanks for posting your software. I especially like the the fact that it is independent of the originating program. As you know, we ran into this problem with Eagle and the original developer disappeared when Eagle had a new version.

Just downloaded it and look forward to giving it a try.

[Daedelus]

No problem.

It seems quite reliable, but its still early in development so let me know if you find any bugs.

Daedelus.

[C_Bubba]

Daedelus,
Last evening, I set up Eagle V6.x so I could see how your program would work. Everything seemed to go fine, but I would like to offer a suggestion.
I can speak only for myself, but for PCB use, I have a fixed fixture on my machine and for doing operations on the TOP of the board, I use fixture 54. For Operations on the bottom of the board, I use fixture 55. So when setting up, I home the machine and load a previously saved fixture file that automatically gives the proper offsets to the various fixtures. Of course as setup, your program does not include any fixture offsets and I would suggest adding a dialogue box to indicate which fixture is going to be used when you parse an individual file. I say give the option to set one because as you say, this can be used for other operations other than PCB work and who knows what fixture offset may be needed?
Thanks in advance and so far, really like how things are setup.

[Daedelus]

Absolutely,
This is one of the features on my list that I want to add.

I am aware that many 'PCBers' use different offsets for top and bottom, but personally I have never tried anything other than G54. If the original file is G55 for example then the additions made by Autoleveller should not affect this and G55 should be used in the output file as well but I haven't tested yet so I cannot confirm. It might be best to stick with G54 for everything currently. As you say though there should be an option to explicitly set the offset.

thanks,

[C_Bubba]

Another reason I bring fixtures up is that I do not use Mach or Linuxcnc as my controller. I use Turbocnc and it defaults to G53 on power up so when I used the test case last night, if I ran it on the machine, it would be in G53 until it hit the modified code portion after the probing sequence. I can easily put G5x in manually until you get it sorted out.
And if anybody else is reading this and wants to use Turbocnc, I have a customized version that captures the probing position for use in this software.

[Daedelus]

TurboCNC support is another feature on my list.

Quite a big list, but its good to know that people want and will use the additions.

[C_Bubba]

It was fairly easy to do (and I am NOT a programer!) I just added enough code to the G31 section to map the position data to the variables 2000-200x. Then I just use the a modified Mach post to generate the gcode.

Matter of fact in the original leveling software, linuxcnc and mach shared the same post.