Possible to see the raw machine coordinates?

It looks like the Nomad is really good at remembering where it is (if I zero out at the corner of the spoilboard, then drill some holes at 9.525 mm and 28.575 mm, say, and then turn it off, come back tomorrow, and try to drill those holes again, the mill will go perfectly right back in the original holes)

The only issue is that if I rezero on something else (like some stock), I lose the zero on the spoil board, so if I want to drill some more dowel pin holes, I have to rezero by hand (and honestly I’m not going to be as accurate as I want).

Is there a way to see the raw coordinates of where the machine thinks it is in relation to the homing switches, so I can take note of them? e.g. it would be nice to write down the absolute coordinates of the zero of the spoil board, and the zero of my 1" high stock at the dowel pins, etc. so that if I ever want to go back, I can just jog straight there without having to painstakingly nudge the mill over while testing for contact, etc.

Better yet, it would be nice to have some presets in carbide motion where I could just save a few locations and rezero to those spots quickly.

This is a good question and a reasonable feature request—and one that a number of people (including me) have asked for too!

The addition of multiple stored work-piece locations/zeros (at least keeping the X &Y, since Z is more troublesome if you get it wrong) would be very helpful.

Actually, I take it back; the X and Y are really accurate if you turn the machine off and on again (as far as I can tell, they are right on), but the Z axis will often be off, by a lot (like completely unrelated to the previous value). I wonder why that is…

Hey - I’ve been a little out of the loop. Has this feature made it into CarbideMotion yet? Now that I’ve got the vise (and have been much more careful about my corner braces so that I’m placing my stock more precisely), it’s a little frustrating having to rezero all the time, or keep track of a bunch of offsets.

i.e. if I find a zero I like that works for my normal stock on the wasteboard, nudged up against a corner brace, then if I zero the machine for a piece of stock held in the vise, I open up a txt file and jot down “current zero is offset +15.10, +93.17, +14.36” so that I can go back if I want.

It would be pretty nice to just be able to write down the machine coordinate of the zero so I don’t have to worry about making a mistake (if I zero and forget to write down an offset, I’m lost).

I’m pretty sure you can do what you’re asking by clicking the “clear all offsets”, which should set the coordinates to whatever the default is (which is repeatable each time you click the clear button), move the cutter at your zero, and then note the absolute coordinates (so don’t click zero - just write down the coordinates)

So when you change your zero for the vise and want to go back to the other zero point, you can do the above process - clear offsets, which gets you back to default, and then you can move the cutter to the absolute coordinates you noted.

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I may be confused… aren’t the coordinates you want printed when jogging the spindle ? In particular, the “set zero” menu should print both the machine and world coordinates.

Alternatively, you can connect to the nomad’s MCU running GRBL over the USB link. It simply appears to the system as a Serial to USB adapter to a “modem” application (Putty, Minicom etc.) can give you an interactive prompt. Connect at 115200 bps.

Type ? and GRBL will return you the maching status. E.g

 <Idle,MPos:5.529,0.560,7.000,WPos:1.529,-5.440,-0.000>

Where MPos and Wpos are what you are looking for (MPos in particular).

Now it would indeed be really cool if CM could display those coordinates everywhere and also accept them as input (and why not allowing you to store them with a comfortable name for later recall).

click in the lower left corner of carbide motion, you will get a little diagnostic window. wish it wasn’t hidden by default.