The setting to toggle on/off probing the tool on M6 would be much better located on either the Setup tab, Manual tab or the Production tab. And toggling should not require a Server Restart, which coincidentally requires a full 5mins of downtime plus requires the machine to be re-homed.
Probing every single time is normally fine, albeit pointless most of the time especially if the tool hasn’t been swapped. But consider the following in case it helps - imagine skimming a surface and a small section gets missed. You quickly turn off Probe Tool on M6, run a small additional tool path with the exact same z-offset as before (ie without probing the tool and without any homing) and then re-enable the setting. I’m sure there’s many other situations that would benefit from not re-homing and not re-measuring the TLO, but in this particular case, the tiny variations that naturally come from both of these leave noticeable marks in the surface, especially for 1 flute tools that have increased variance in TLO measurements with clock/heading of +/-0.1mm (total 0.2mm variance).
Another useful way of approaching this would be to implement a TLO re-measure button next to (or near) the Tool number label on the Manual and Production tabs (in the middle of the Power/Torque Temperature circle on the left) for the fewer occasions that the tool stickout is actually changed, and with this introduction, remove (or have the option to turn off) re-measuring TLO if the tool number stays the same.
@fnhalluk why would there be an M06 if the tool is already loaded in the spindle? The post should be able to handle that so as not to have to re probe or do a homing move etc.
Or just delete the tool call and M06 from the GCode if the post cant do the smarts.
cheers
TP
If you split up a NC program into subprograms without changing the tool, I found it also annoying, that the tooling always repeats.Therefore I use now M654 and control from the post.
Are you guys using Fusion [360] to generate the tool paths? Or some other software?
Fusion sticks the tool change in at the start because it has no way of knowing what tool was in previously/currently. It would seem reasonable that other software might take the same approach, at least for a machine like the Pocket NC which doesn’t have an automatic tool changer.
Since the whole point of Fusion and the Penta interface is to keep things user friendly and remove the need for users to have to edit gcode, my goal here is for Penta to understand the desire for a button/toggle to turn off/on TLO probing WITHOUT having to restart the Server side of the machine (which IMHO seems like a ridiculous necessity) and to bring this toggle to the fore (main interface tabs).
I’m using Siemens NXCam and I made the posts for NXCam. I think the F360 posts are made by autodesk.
Maybe a support call to auto desk to explain the situation to see what can be done. I agree it should be easy without manually editing. I’m surprised a redundant command is input unless the idea is for the entire program to be started at any operation so then a tool call would be needed. But yeah, probing would risk changing the tool height. Handling this would typically be done with the opskip function so the tool call would have a / in front so if the opskip is turned on any line with a preceding / would be ignored or if opskip is off then the / lines would be processed.
Cheers
TP
Following this documentation: G Code Overview, I edited the gcode to put a forward slash in front of the line calling for the tool change to effectively “comment” it out, ie:
/N40 T3 M6
and this worked, preventing the TLO probing and going straight to machining.
Looking at the Linux cnc document for block delete it seems it can be toggled on and off with alt-m. To be honest I’ve never tried so I’m glad it worked out for you.
Cheers
TP
