The bitsetter on the Shapeoko Pro is fantastic…but…it only works if your endmill is greater than 1.5 inches. The reason is, when establishing zero, the endmill cannot reach the button, yet, can reach the desired depth of the worksurface, because you are typically using these sort of tiny endmills for vcarves, engraving, etc.
What would be awesome, would be if Carbide3D sold a magnetic pin that went ontop of the bitsetter and altered the height for probing these small endmills. When you select “tool change” in carbide motion, there would be a checkbox to indicate whether you have the ‘magnetic pin’ on top of the bitsetter (I have mocked the magnetic pin up in the photo)
@robgrz - I’m thinking this would take less than a day to build into Carbide Motion (1 hour of coding and 7 hours testing) and then you would either need to mill or procure the magnetic pin - but I would definitely pay $50 for this (however I think a reasonable price would be between $20-$30). I am assuming that this change would pay for itself pretty quickly
If you have the pin or magnets on the button when you turn on the machine and you leave it there until you turn it off, then there doesn’t need to be any software change.
So if you are always using smaller endmills, you could set this up as a semi-permanent thing.
Hahaha - I have learnt that if you tell a good honest software developer a crazy amount of time to code and test something, they love coming back and impressing you…”that’s easy, can get it done in 30mins”…but if you ask him to do it in 30 mins, they come back and tell you all the reasons why it can’t be done
Brandon, won’t your stack of magnets work the way you want BitSetter to work?
I glued a thin (a couple of millimeters) magnet on my BitSetter because scrapes and gouges were occurring on the surface. I’ve never noticed any problem with that as a permanent arrangement.
You might run into some limit built into CM for the height of the stack, but try sticking one magnet on the button and adding your stack to find out.
One complication here is that the pin has to have high parallelism tolerance on both ends, otherwise your measured height will vary according to the location of the lowest point of the endmill (e.g. if you rotate a single-flute endmill to a different position).
Not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s not trivial.
We were 4-1 in our day (rather than 1-7!).