Z axis height at end of cut

precision? heck I'm on your side Tommy. I want it fast! I think I'm gunna paint the spaceship red! that will make it faster!

Hi,
I got a few questions and comments about probing.
I like the idea of FAST probing. My probing works but I still need to improve it. Tommy do you always install floating heads on your machines? I do not have a floating head on my torch holder, I do everything with ohmic only. Is this a good idea or should I be switching my torch holder to floating? I prefer not to, because it just adds another joint for torch movement. It has a ball and socket magnetic torch breakaway, which lets it move if it does slam into the steel. Phill I really like your fast probing, but I wonder, how good is it for the torch consumables to slam down fast into the steel? My challenge is that I cut a wide range of thickness of steel. So if I set my probe height high, I have a lot of time spent with slow probing on thin sheets and if I set it low and forget to set it higher for thicker steel and slam my torch onto the steel. Phill how complicated would it be to tie the material thickness in with the probe height? Probe height would be the distance from min. height + distance to top of slats + material thickness + tolerance above material.
Welcome your comments.
Earl

tommylight wrote:

flamecutter wrote:

I started liking (blame Rod for that) ohmic due to the use of THCAD, but i can not have anything not 100% reliable on the machines, so for now it is on hold until i can do some torture testing.

Sorry about being liked and blamed at the same time!

Plasmac will still retain your float switch which will be used as a fall back if Ohmic fails (If I can believe Phill!) I'm sure he blames me for making his job hard too!

phillc54 wrote:

how complicated would it be to tie the material thickness in with the probe height? Probe height would be the distance from min. height + distance to top of slats + material thickness + tolerance above material.

Not something I had ever thought of. It would require another parameter for thickness in the cut parameters and material file plus another config panel setting for top of highest slat plus a bit of code. It would also need a bit of thought on how to work for existing material files. Looking at it makes me wish I had thought of it in the beginning, it seems to make sense to me. Probing has always been a PITA. It will be interesting to hear comments from others.

Certainly on my torch I don't think the shield should get damaged.

But this answers and interesting point. It would be great if there was a pin in device units that was for material thickness that could be accessed in real time.

I've extended the interpreter state tags in master branch to include the arc radius when moving under a G2 or G3. I've also created a new pin to publish this as part of motion. This value changes in real time! Hopefully, this will end up in master branch eventually.

The goal is to create a more sophisticated hole cutting algorithm bundled up into a component and I think material thickness would be a useful input to this. eg. Treat hole cutting a bit different on 1mm thick material v's 20 mm by working on radii based on multiples of the material thickness.

I've had Andy helping in the background so my payment to the movement is to extend these enhancements to publish the heading. That is the tangent at the current position on the arc. This will be able to be used to control a tangential cutter. I'm nearly there. I got tangents being reported just after midnight last night. I also want to add another pin that goes true when we are cutting a hole, so we can take different actions on a fillet v's a hole.

Then I guess I'll have to learn how to document it.