Anyone using probes and or camera to find center?

1

Good day.
Anyone is using some type of probe or camera to find the center and or measurements of items? Mach4 user here.

Sometime I get odd shape items and wasting time trying to get centers. I know there is a better way.

2

brettbond has Paper Tools that could easily do this. I think he is beta testing it at this point, and it is web cam based. Hit him up!

3

If you haven’t calibrated the probe to a known setter ring then the output is pretty much garbage. Just like your end mills aren’t the size stamped on their case, neither are the ruby balls on the probes (and if you don’t have a ruby ball, well…).

I suggest minimum something like a Mitutoyo 177-187 and if you have the ESS, turn off the error on no-strike and use the Newfangled calibration function. If your probe is NO, never set the e-stop down or you will hate yourself.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SG7PZW

If you are using a camera, if the camera isn’t perfectly aligned to the surface then you will never get good results. Even 1 or 2 degrees difference can be a great deal of inaccuracy.

4

Yes, my camera plugin might help with this problem. You have to decide on the center of your workpiece. But wherever that is, you draw a mark on the center. What Paper Tools will do is then move your router over the square, it uses computer vision to find it and I’ve gotten repeatability of +/-0.002. Then you can zero your machine over that square and begin your cut.

Here’s a post that talks more about it:
https://forum.avidcnc.com/t/mach4-plugin-try-out-my-visual-cnc-plugin-and-give-feedback/1990