Hello,
I have been cutting for about a week now and have decided it’s time I can graduate to endstops :>
Making a touchplate seems very handy since I can put it onto the material and get homed the right distance from it.
I was looking for touchplate designs on thingiverse before making my own. I saw a lot that say they find corners. How does it do that? I thought touchplate was just for z axis?
Thanks
Corner finder depends on the firmware. I don’t think marlin does it well. Generally we just use it for Z.
Have a look at the g38. It has modifiers (38.1,38.2…) that can indicate probe toward, probe away, with or without alarm on failure.
One parameter it takes is the axis to probe. I had it working nicely on my lowrider, but using the default pin as the probe in marlin was a hard fail. I had to explicitly name the pin (even though it was the default) and then it worked great. Only gotcha i can think of.
Marlin has had a lot of development since then, but I don’t know if that was addressed and I’ve been using grbl on my cncs after that.
Sometimes I get carried away with the detail of a question and forget to look for the bigger point. So, disclaimer:
I did it, it was fun, and I learned a lot about marlin and gcode along the way. I probed xy MAYBE a few times, and those were just checking that it worked. I have never, even once, had occasion to probe xy for a job. Turns out most of us like to place stock at a known location on the spoilboard.
Smart money says its a fun project, but won’t be useful.
That said, this IS a hobby for most of us, so if you want a little more info, these might be helpful.
Thanks that’s helpful, so I will just make a simple one I can put on top of the spoilboard or stock I’ll be cutting.
Today I try out resurfacing but on my scrap temp spoilboard, wish me luck :>
The corner finders never made sense to me, because they don’t detect the angle of the workpiece anyway. I usually just manually set up the jobs anyway.
Ryan has a nice little touch plate in the shop: Tiny Touch Plate – V1 Engineering Inc
Even if you want to make it yourself, you should at least look at what he’s made. The clip grabs the magnet, and then magnets to the bit. The touch plate is precisely 0.5mm thick.
Not by default, but it is possible. Estlcam has this build in. I analyzed if it would be doable with Marlin, and it actually is. It is a matter of doing some touch points and make a custom Gcode command. Was going to experiment with it myself but the life happened:D
I believe I added the gcode (for x/ y) in another Z probe related topic.
Edit: here: What's the Tiny Touch Plate Neodymium Magnet for? - #14 by DougJoseph
btw, this is a nice alternative too;
The aluminum tape is what i use i cut a straight edge on the left side of my spoilboard for the X zero and use it to set x zero and Y zero the probe for Z zero on cut surface. I have to have a uncut Z surface to do a tool change so i plan that ahead but it works great and 0.01 mm for the tape if i remembered correct got the by measure the tape the then subtracting the backing thickness.
Corner finders are nice on the big machines because generally the vise is squared to the machine.
That’s for the replies, much appreciated. Will think about this and look before I make one and enable it :>