Any plans to allow offsets for touch probing?

Carbide Motion 4 has native support for XYZ probing provided you have the official Carbide Motion touch probe, which isn’t actively being produced and is therefore impossible to acquire. You can make or purchase a third party touch probe block, and the GRBL controller will read the circuit closure just fine when using the probing function within Carbide Motion, but of course the block will not be the same dimensions as the official touch probe. The obvious solution is to allow XYZ offsets in the probing function that account for the difference in the probe dimensions, but this is not present.

The only solutions I know about are using third party software like UGS which kind of defeats the purpose of having a simple solution like Carbide Motion in the first place since it can do everything else too.

Are there any plans to implement this given that the official probe is indefinitely out of production? Even if there are plans to revive the official probe, it’d still be a nice feature.

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It’s being actively produced they just aren’t releasing them for sale as they become available because they keep selling out instantly. My understanding is there’s a well trained robot assigned to the problem.

That said, I wish they’d just say ‘mea culpa’ on this one and make it easy to use 3rd party probes. I realize the probe would be a good second revenue source but I agree the stocking issues are frustrating, and that’s after a long wait for the initial release in the first place.

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The probe would be a revenue stream, sure, but I think most users would purchase it over a third party one at the time of purchasing the machine if it were available, so they’re likely not going to lose out too much on people buying third party even if offsets are supported.

The danger they face right now is that because they don’t offer a touch plate, people WILL buy third party and will abandon Carbide Motion because they’ll end up using UGS or another piece of software. Once they’re comfortable with UGS, what reason would they have to ever come back to Carbide Motion? There’s brand utility in having people stay in your software framework, as well as up sell opportunity if they ever release a “pro” version with more powerful features.

Right now, touch probe capabilities are too important to the basic needs of the machine to wall off. I don’t want to learn a more complicated piece of software. I just want to make some cuts. But that’s what I’m going to have to do now.

You gota get in quick mate :slight_smile:

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