Tried to do some cutting today and ran into an issue.
The EX controll Fusion post processor sets up G43 commands to use tool length compensation, but the tool length offset was set in my jobs to be H1 in my tool library.
This meant that for tools other that T1, the length offset was grabbing the H1 offset that is set when T1 is measured. If the offset is not correctly set, then the overall Z work space is not where you think it is. Fortunately, all that happened is that CNC12 told me the first Z motion was out of range, but it took me a bit to figure out what was going on.
What finally clued me in was looking at the working volume in the job graph it was all below the surface of the spoil board.
So, if you are using Fusion and the Ex controller, make sure you have the tool offsets in your tool library.
I’ll probably add a little code to my copy of the post to warn whenever the tool offset is not equal to the tool number, since that appears to be the default way the tool heights are getting set by the Avid touch plate.
Hope that saves someone else a bit of confusion and/or a machine crash.
Technically it’s not a problem with the post. It’s a problem with the tool library in my fusion setup. Some of the tools somehow ended up with the height offset set to 1 even though the tool number was something else. This is not the default. If you copy tools, say out of the Amana tool library the height offset number will be a formula equal to the tool number. I suspect the library probably got manually edited at some point when I needed to do something weird with Mach4.
I went through and validated all of the tools in the tool library and only a few of them had this problem. I just happened to run into it on the job I was trying to do yesterday.
The problem I have now, is that specific jobs that I already have made probably have local document copies of tools with bad setups. This is why I will probably make a change to my copy of the post to warn about the problem. I want to catch the problem whenever I rerun the post on a job converting from the old Mach4 setup the Centroid setup.
On the control (CNC12) whenever you change a tool we always switch to the same height number. So Tool 7 would have height 7, no exceptions.
I suspect what’s going on here is that you’re getting a G43 command AFTER the tool change command (which sets the height number).
My suggestion (as you figured out) would be to fix your tool library. I can look at removing that G43 command from the post altogether as it’s unneeded given the way we run our controls.