I recently learned that the ONLY bits that can be used in Carbide Motion for probing to zero X/Y/Z are those that were hard coded into the product. I needed to resurface my spoil board and wanted to use a large end mill designed specifically for this purpose. I was surprised to find no surfacing bits offered and no way to fix it (bit adding/editing). The solution suggested by the Carbide 3D forum was to load a supported tool and probe X/Y/Z and then load the surfacing bit and zero for Z. Seriously? This is clumsy at best and a PITA work around.
Here’s a simple to do, but better way to handle this and how I’d have done it if I wrote the app. Update Carbide Motion to load a bit configuration file for the bits people use. This could be formatted as a simple JSON text file containing a list of the bits with the attributes for name and diameter. If the user wants to use a surfacing bit, they could simply add one to the bit configuration file and then restart Carbide Motion. BAM … done! Then the list of bits to select from for probing would contain valid options so the user doesn’t have to fool around with a work around.
If you’d prefer to build bit management functionality into settings, knock yourself out, but a config file would fix it and take very little effort to git-r-done. If you’d like to release your source code to the open source community, I’m sure someone (like me) could help with this and other fun features.