Is there any way to save G38.2 probe points? I found a software package that would be great for probing small areas( for PCB work) of the bed size but it does not appear to save the probe points. The name of this software package is AutoLevelAE. This is driving me nuts that not all PCB blanks are flat enough to be used on my machine. I’ve made a few PCBs and they turned out great if you search for my new build post you can see my results. So if there is a way to integrate or use the files produced by this software package I’m all for it. The PFG file produced by this package works perfectly for probing the entire black PCB. I just don’t know if marlin is actually saving that data to be used on the next run or not.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreaciated and thanks in advance.
Have you surfaced a board to be “flat” to put the pcb on? That still isn’t flat enough?
There are arguments for G29 to let you add a start and max size for the area to probe. This works with bilinear mesh leveling, I think. You would make sure you gcode did not do any compensation, run G29 BLAH BLAH to probe the board and then XY movements would also adjust the z.
Jeffeb3, yes I have leveled the board for this. The spoil board for doing this is made before each run of a PCB. The bed leveling is needed because the PCB material is really thin on average of 1 mm thick for a two-sided board. So you can see how critical bed leveling is for this material. I know you can get thicker material but I have a 3’x3’ sheet of this stuff that I’d like to use up before buying the thicker material. I did look into doing G29 but kept hitting a homing Z problem since corrected but was really hoping to be able to automate the process like the above mentioned software does.
No practical knowledge here, but a couple of ideas. Conceptually it seems to me that you could mount your material and bed level against that material (rather than the spoil board) to achieve what you want. There may be some hoops to jump through wrt bed size or some other action you might need to take to fool Marlin into thinking that the mounted material is the bed.
G38.2 does not save the points, but it also does not set the position to 0 like a homing, so you can query for that position (M114). An external program that communicates to Marlin could collect an array of probed points. I’d use an Arduino since it is what I know, but I’m sure there are other solutions. Not sure what solutions are available to take that array of points and modify the g-code. Writing that from scratch is a much bigger piece of work than just collecting probed points.