qtdragon - probing issues

Well, I got the GUI sorted, now on to trying to make something! I ran into issues probing so I will report them here and apend additional ones I find:

Basic Probe
1 Outside corners works perfectly. I think I tried them all (at least 3 anyway)
1. Outside corners - probe to edge works perfectly.
2. Outside corners - probe to surface fails, Probe goes nowhere
3. Boss and pocket. Pocket does not work on a 10mm hole (I even added a hint) Seems that its not doing a G38 move when it hits the first edge (Probe triggered while not probing error)

Versb.y Probing
Not tried.  Will try it and report back. Really need that surface probe to work

I'll try to setup a test on the weekend.
there was a request to modify things here and. I'm not sure they got looked at:
forum.linuxcnc.org/qtvcp/46615-probe-basic-in-qtdragon?start=10

Obviously better docs are needed. I am hoping someone who uses the routines could help.

Chris

versb.y
I was able to probe to surface with vers.by.
Outside corners seems OK.
Its a bit of a nuisance as you have to swap probe screens between corners and surface

If I probed to surface and told it to raise 10mm for safety at the end, probing to the corner seemed to  probe at the surface level of the material.
It need to drop a bit lower (12-15mm say) but I could not get it to seperate the finish height from the side probe travel down before probing
changing some parameters  got me closer to probing a 10mm hole but it errors again
It seems the circular pocket rapids for a while before probing. his makes no sense, I would have thought the probe should drop in the hole and then immediately start probing so it never can hit the edge on a non probe move.

The ideal solution would be to fix the probe to surface on basic probe.
I think the workflow should be:
1. move to near a corner (top left for me)
2. Probe for surface which retracts to a safe height after probing
3. Probe for the corner  but allow the probe to descend by safe height + some number

And also like the other thread, I cannot get a manual tool change to work. Nothing displays.
I worked through the docs again carefully and wrote a small test program. Thats where I am right now.

You should be able to test the tool change in a sim.

I might add that I have got TTS holders and all my tools are measured with lengths in the tool library so I can't wait to run a job with a manual pause for the tool changer.

Basic Probe - Probe to surface:
I found the Bug!
QTdragon uses the Max XY Dist when probing  to find the surface instead of Max Z Dist
In my case the XY Distance was fairly high and there was not enough Z axis travel so it threw an error. When I changed it to agree with my Max Z Dist it worked!

But where does the Z axis Probing Gcode come from?
I assumed it was from ~/linuxcnc/nc_files somewhere but it does not seem to be.
It would be great if you could push a fix for this Chris.

As an aside, the current probe routines are fairly inefficient and probably have their roots in Mach somewhere.
Linuxcnc can probe towards and away from a surface. This would be much more efficientWen I did this, the position change by about 0.02mm and under a glass, you could not even see a gap between the probe and the surface
But hey, I'll just settle for a working probe!

Looks like probing don doesn't use either distance, it uses max_travel:
From lib/python/qtvcp/widgets/probe_routines

manual tool change: are you saying the pop up dialog doesn't work in sims?

cmorley wrote:

manual tool change: are you saying the pop up dialog doesn't work in sims?

I got this working today. Missing a connection and I found the answer  here

Max_travel must be set from Max XY Dist in the probe panel. I could see this when running the ini  with -d
I had it set to 50mm and the Z at 10mm. 50mm was too far for my Z so it was erroring. Eventually I twigged what was going on. Changing 50mm to 10mm fixed my problem.

The Z axis probing distance should be set by Z Max travel field.
 

Ok I can see the problem in the code.
The underlying probe routines don't even get separate xy/z max travel lengths.

It will take me a while to tease out the fix though.

is there a big advantage of separate xy/z max lengths?