Touch probe in Avid CRP800 control

Subnoize,
Attached is the configuration that I have set up for the Drewtronics probe… Can you take a quick look and point out any obvious mistakes (or even not so obvious)?

Thanks.
Drewtronics Config.pdf (132.9 KB)

If you have a Warp9 ESS you will need to disable the “ESS/Probing_Failure_Disables_Mach” as described above in order to use the Newfangled probing routines.

Now, for the PDF the probe can handle that voltage, I am not sure if all pins on the ESS are 24v ready. I would chat with the Warp9 folks. I believe the guy is Andrew. My voltage for that pin is a little over 10 volts.

I am a total idiot when it comes to electronics diagrams. Can you link to the resistor you are using? Pictures of your wiring would help greatly as well. :slight_smile:

Bill,
I am going to try wiring things up tonight and if I am successful, I will post the particulars.

Just FYI, I am not using the AVID controller but I am using the ESS with a MB3 breakout board (CNCRoom).

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Great thanks! If you get it working I might go the same direction!

Bill,
I wired the probe up as shown in the attachment. I got the schematic from the CNCRoom (MB3 supplier) forum. It worked like a charm… probe triggers and LED illuminates. I used a 2.5K ohm resistor, and my breakout board inputs are 24v, so you might need a different one depending on your specifics.

Now I’ll have to figure out appropriate probing routines…

Let me know if you have additional questions.

Lynn

Ah! The fun begins! :partying_face:

As someone who just went through this for my tool rack (and linuxcnc), some advice… which is hopefully obvious!

  • Set your feed rate override really low, like 10%

  • Set your rapids override low also

  • Practice with no tool holders anywhere, neither in pockets nor in the spindle.

  • Keep your hand over the e-stop button at all times

In my case I started with simple routines (static gcode files) that either inserted or removed a tool from a single pocket, so I could tweak the path and speeds and worked my way up from there.

You might also consider taking the bolts out of your tool pocket clamps and holding them on with double sided tape or velcro, so they’ll give easily when you screw up.

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And cross your legs in case of flying debris :rofl:

Great thanks! Mine will be 12v so do I need to get a smaller resistor?

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For my setup, the 2.5k ohm resistor will drop 20% of the voltage in the divider network (the 2.5k and the 10k from the probe) so when the probe trips, 19.2v is presented to the probe input, which is enough to trigger the input.

SO keeping the same resistor will result in 9.6v being presented at the probe input of the controller when the probe is tripped. Is that enough tp trip your controller?

Guess there is only 1 one way to find out :laughing: at least in my non-electrical mind.

@subnoize Do you happen to use a custom button in mach4 to turn this feature on and off? I set a toggle button with an up and down script to use the command you specified but it doesn’t seem to be working.

If you don’t use a button, how do you handle this in the middle of a project?

OK, so that is to disable the ESS from throwing an exception for no-strike probe moves.

If you could provide a little more context about why you are disabling a safety feature? There is a lot of really bad stuff written above :rofl: and I really don’t want to get you hurt or break your machine. The objective is to have fun and learn the least expensive way :grin:

@subnoize I set up a touch probe as described early on. I need to disable the feature so I can use the integrated mach 4 probe functions like described on the warp 9 page you linked.

Ah!

You have to check the error codes from that call. Lua in Mach4 is actually very chatty but with return codes. In the documentation there is a list of codes so you can print out the reason it failed.

Lua is weird in the land of programming languages in that it returns more than one value from a function call. So buried in those calls to Mach4’s API is a status code of some sort. Non zero is an error.

You can find many examples of checking for errors and printing the human readable reason/description over on Newfangled’s Mach4 forum and in the documentation.

You can print to the Mach4’s status bar by just doing a print("Hello, World!")

Also, you never got a reference to the runtime inst so that would be null in your call.

And you can take out the string.format(....) since there is no dynamic values being inserted in the string. When I copied the code from my library it had some extra stuff in it that you do not need. You just need the raw string.

Question here… would a wireless probe be easier? s5100 Wireless CNC Probe – DrewTronics

Wireless probes are expensive, if you can find them.

The Drewtronics is based on IR LED and detector. The dust manifold on my system would block the light :frowning:

I haven’t had time to investigate any of this yet but I’m kinda wondering if it would be easier to utilize m2010 to do the necessary change.

Regarding the string removal - I noticed that it’s listed in a near identical way on the Warp 9 page. The only difference is that the first line doesn’t start with “local.”
Probing in Mach4.

hregProbingFailureDisablesMach = mc.mcRegGetHandle(inst, string.format(“ESS/Probing_Failure_Disables_Mach”))
mc.mcRegSetValue(hregProbingFailureDisablesMach , 0 )

Also, I’m using this wireless probe and it’s awesome so far