I mostly cut parts out of acrylic sheet. I almost always hold with tape & often use the wasteboard edges as guides for positioning my sheets. I usually zero to the bottom left corner of the sheet / wasteboard, and occasionally to the top left.
I’m thinking of making a new wasteboard & would like to use the rapid locations as the corners / constraining dimensions. Then I can just rapid to the corner I need & set it as zero. Per the dimensions below, that equals an 810mm wide x 770mm deep wasteboard.
Is there any reason I can’t or shouldn’t do this?
And I had no reason to notice this before, but I see that the horizontal “mid” rapid points aren’t truly in the center of anything - they’re closer to the back of the machine. Any reason why? I’d also like to use the mid rapid point as a zero for the jigs & fixtures I create. It just means I have to reach a little further… I’m just curious why it is where it is.
I’ve used the center position several times and I have a jig to hold standardized sized material and many use the front left position as their origin where they place a square to align material. I can’t see why other preset positions would not work also.
I’ve heard of many people doing that, and I thought about it myself. After considering it, I ended up deciding that the inconvenience of doing my Carbide Motion rapids via MDI was more than offset by the flexibility I gained by not just using the hard-coded rapids. They just weren’t in ideal locations.
Of course, since a good chunk of my use cases now require me to use something other than Carbide Motion (e.g. CM cannot properly support my laser module), it’s all but a moot point. In anything other than CM, it’s trivial to set up your own rapids as macros, and for your effort in getting up to speed on a new sender, you also gain the ability to use multiple Work Coordinate Systems. (For example, I’ll set a jig for the front, another for the back, each with their own zeroes. Making multiple parts gets really streamlined.)
I could use multiple WCS’s for some of what I do - particularly the aluminum jobs. The only reason I’m sticking with Carbide Motion for now is because my helper (my dad) is comfortable with it. I like cncjs but he’s not ready to learn something new & likes the simplicity of CM.
Off subject, but I can use both controllers, right? cncjs for me & my jobs, CM for his?