Added A axis to XYZ mill, what can be done in AXIS?

I recently added a rotary workpiece holder to my working XYZ mill. It rotates around X, center of rotation is at Y = 70mm and Z is not known until after touchoff. Using AXIS 2.7.12

The actual physical motion works as expected, but the AXIS display is confusing, I have tried both axyz and xyza.

How can I tell AXIS where the rotational axis is centered?

Is there a (simulated or real) machine setup to look at? I have found 3-axis and 9-axis sim examples.

The Axis preview assumes that the centre of rotation of A is Z=0 X=0 (I think)
It doesn't have any way to know where the actual centre of rotation is, unfortunately.

I have found Rot4thaxiskins in the Wiki.
It looks very promising, but I am not quite there yet. I am using 2.7.12 and my configuration files are attached.
Manual control has Joint 0,1,2,3 present.
MDI has the full axis set XYZAUVW

If I do an "empty" homing in "Manual control" and then switch to MDI then all axis shows as homed and motion preview looks really great. The tool is moving around the stationary workpiece.

But I have not got real homing to work The "Touch off" button is also grayed out..
If I do *any* manual movement in "Manual control" after homing, I cannot switch to MDI, the error "all joints must be homed before going into coordinated mode" appears.

I would like to touch off the tool tip to the center of the rotation axis in Y,Z and some suitable X. How to do this?

That all seems a bit odd.

Are you in a position to try with the Master (development) branch where no-cartesian machines are a little better handled?

OK,
I will try to setup a Master environment and see what happens.

Maybe I am currently running a too old release?
Linux debianRT 3.4-9-rtai-686-pae #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 3.4.55-4linuxcnc i686 GNU/Linux
AXIS 2.7.12

Wirewrap wrote: OK,
I will try to setup a Master environment and see what happens.
Maybe I am currently running a too old release?
Linux debianRT 3.4-9-rtai-686-pae #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 3.4.55-4linuxcnc i686 GNU/Linux
AXIS 2.7.12

That should be fine.

buildbot.linuxcnc.org

Your kernel seems to indicate Wheezy and RTAI, so you would use:
deb buildbot.linuxcnc.org/ wheezy master-rt
deb-src buildbot.linuxcnc.org/ wheezy master-rt

You can do this in the GUI if you want.
System->Synaptic Package Manager
Settings->Repositories
Then click the "Add" button.

This is what mine looks like (as you can see I have set it to an old 2.6 version for testing, but Master is there as an option)