AIUI, Carbide Motion disables certain origin commands.
If you want unfettered access to such, you’ll have to switch tools.
One thing which I have done is to use one tool to do homing, powered the machine down once it was at the desired origin, powered it up using Carbide Motion, verified the zero was still good, then made the cut.
Thank you Will. So if I am understanding correctly, if I want to use the Triquetra without shutting down the machine then I will need to use something different than CM?
If you can’t use the corner finder w/o using the native CM interface, or supported commands, yes, you’ll need to use bCNC or UGS or something else.
Got it, thank you.
As my wife says…“just throw more money at it”…lol
No money involved. Universal-GCode Sender and bCNC are both free, open source projects. They both work pretty well too.
Awesome, was doing a search on both of them as you posted Tim and Will.
Wife will be happy!
Thanks!
Should work fine with MDI on CM, shouldn’t it?
Only if one can work around the coordinate systems which CM disallows.
Anyone try changing the .txt to a .Nc file yet? I havnt had time to try it out yet let alone try diffrent extensions for the homing file
I generated the txt file via the Triquetra excel file. Following Will’s suggestion I changed the file extension from .txt to .nc Carbide Motion opened the file and immediately gave me an Unsupported code error. I reviewed the code, first lines are G92 commands. As discussed G92 is not supported by CM. This is very disappointing. Now if I want the functionality of the Triquetra I need to find, install, and learn a whole new piece of software. I would sure like to hear from someone at Carbide on this topic. I think they should rethink allowing the G92 command, at least provide a patch that would allow the command if we wanted it.
It is disappointing Robert as I would really like to use CM as well. But as Tim and Will suggested I did download UGS and have it up and running. Not much to learn on the interface. I had to change the baud rate to 115200 by clicking the drop down menu box to get it to work. Also I got hung up on the GRBL Alarm Lock. You have to click on the $X button in the Machine Control tab to jog the machine around. In my opinion it’s well worth the the little bit of effort to be able to use the Triquetra. Oh and one other point…you will have to download Java if your computer does not already have it installed. I have not run any code yet but will test it tonight.
The Triquetra looks nice, but I don’t know that I would use anything but the Z probe. Once you have a touch plate, it is very easy to use in UGS. I learned from the following video:
Clip one aligator clip to the bit and the other to your touch plate.
Set tool height about 1/4" above probe surface on top of the material you are going to cut.
issue command G38.2 Z- .5 F1 (probe down .5 inch at 1 inch per minute). Probe should stop as soon as contact is made with the touch plate.
Once the probe stops, enter command G92 Z .065 (or whatever the thickness of the touch plate is). This sets the current Z position to .065, so the work position will be exactly at zero.
That is all there is. I made a macro in UGS for each command, so setting Z is easy. Remember to remove the clip from the bit before starting the router!
UGS (nightly build version, latest stable) works great on my XXL. I just switched from it to grblweb on a headless Raspberry Pi to make the whole shop setup wireless and take the monitor/keyboard out of picture – more for when I am using the table saw than for the XXL, since I have a dust head that works pretty well on the XXL.
But in my view UGS is better than CM for Shapeoko. Jobs run great, and the built in smartphone pendant makes it far better than CM. Plus you can run it on any platform, you aren’t stuck putting a Windows PC or Mac in your shop environment. (I haven’t run any significant jobs with grblweb yet – it seems similar to UGS except that it runs in a web browser from any computer or phone on your wifi. You can even run jobs from your phone. But I like the UGS pendant jogging better).
I haven’t used anything but CM on my Nomad Pro yet (CM does that nice automatic tool measurement thing), but I frankly don’t see any big deal in using different g-code senders and picking the one you like best. There seems to be quite a few free ones which are more than adequate, at least from my newbie perspectIve.
When saving a tool path in vectric do I use the same post processor for UGS as I did with CM?
Yes they are the same.
@Sarge,
Yes, I use the Shapeoko post processor (downloaded off the Net from Inventables, IIRC) for V-Carve Pro for all three of the g-code senders I have tried: CM, UGS, and grblweb. You have to remove the first line produced by the post processor (a tool change I think). At some point I will probably make a modified version of the post processor – should be a simple edit - to get rid of that first line.
But that is a Vectric/Shapeoko thing, I don’t think it has anything to do with which g-code sender you use.
I got mine set up and fine tuned yesterday. It works very well. And as Will suggested you can use (in my case) UGS to zero everything out, shut down and start CM. Re zero using CM and run your code. I’ll probably stay with UGS at this point…once you learn the interface it’s no big deal and it works well.
Great info @Bjohnes.
I received my unit on Monday, and after going thru the material I finally got UGS pulled down and running in prep to start using the spreadsheet G-code tool. After a small hiccup (one must HOME first, otherwise alarms ensue) I had this up and running with no issue.
I thought I’d try running a Carbide Create G-code job, first removing the DeWalt and jogging to a mock zero position. I loaded the CM G-code file, but no dice.
Again my noob’nish surfaces, but isn’t G-code G-code?
I’m pretty sure that Carbide Create jobs only run on Carbide Motion, since the software is “free” with Carbide 3D machines. I recently bought V-Carve Pro, and it is awesome sauce for 2.5D design and toolpaths … but it ain’t cheap.
Glad you guys are getting good results. I certainly wouldn’t have recommended this if I didn’t believe it was a great option. As far as gcode being gcode yes it is but it isn’t. Some controllers don’t recognize certain gcodes as valid. I think G92 is one of those that isn’t recognized and Charley’s gcode generator uses G92
