Right off the bat, I’m not experienced with Carbide Motion. I just ordered an XXL and have been digging into everything.
One feature I haven’t seen in C.M. is a variable jog position. The 9 major positions are handy, but more specific movements would be nice. Something where you can enter a X, Y, and/or Z position and have the machine either rapid or feed to it. This is a feature on the Siemens 840D and it is super handy to check positions and faster than MDI.
That feature (workspace coordinate systems) is a part of Grbl, and we use it to enable some aspects of our machine operation.
Other communication / control programs do support this sort of thing, see: https://github.com/gnea/grbl/wiki/Using-Grbl and https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Communication_/_Control and https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Commercial_Software#Communication.2FControl.2FG-Code_Interpreter — but I’m afraid Carbide Motion doesn’t yet have that — and adding it will require working up a way to provide it which won’t confuse people like me who support the machines.
Best bet to rapid to different XYZ locations is to get comfortable with the MDI mode, although most users aren’t going to feel comfortable doing manual text entry and sending those commands to machine.
EDIT Sorry, @CatalystGilles mentioned not wanting to use MDI. I don’t have a solution outside of that.
let’s petition for adding a small number of configurable buttons somewhere in the UI, and the ability to associate arbitrary G-code macros to each button, and this will do it.
I am very comfortable in MDI mode as I program machines for work. I just got to use a system like I described on a large mill and it was super handy for setting up work pieces and verifying locations.
Configurable buttons would be great, but they might want to have it as an enabled option for more advanced users.
The MDI will be getting the ability to store a few commonly used lines that can be entered with a single press so I think that will be the home for this type of functionality going forward.
Briliant ! Thank you
Though this doesn’t address the general case, if the goal is to get to a specific location, and you do not need to preserve the current zero-- for example, going to a location to set it as zero-- seek a known location, set the x, y, and z location (as needed) to NEGATIVE the desired motion, then seek current offset.
This is not the most elegant, but gets the job done without CM losing its sanity.
My main desire is to set work offsets and then verify them by moving to a know position. For example, set the top center of a rectangle as your coordinate system, them move to the X and Y position of a corner and position the cutter a known height above the stock so you can verify it with a scale or other measurement tool.
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