Z probe and tool setter combo

Hello everybody!

The 3-axis machine I'm trying to retrofit has a tool setter button fixed on the bed, as well as a spindle Z probe, and I'm trying to make it work (using qtdragon, if that matters). I don't know the length of the probe, and I don't want to use a fixed value for it due to the possible spindle clamping variations, so I'd like to measure it against the tool setter before every probing routine.

In order to do that, I need to move the probe down until BOTH the probe and the tool setter contacts are closed, to compensate for the probe's action distance. In other situations - probing the stock or setting the end mill length - I need the machine to go until EITHER of the contacts is closed.

The issue is, there are no separate HAL pins to feed the tool setter and the probe signals into, just motion.probe-input. I can combine the signals with or2/and2 and it works for one of the scenarios, but obviously not for the other.

How do you folks solve that? I can't imagine I'm the first one with this question, but digging the forums did not produce anything helpful for me.

Thanks in advance!

 

I would recommend starting with AXIS, there's a reason it's the default GUI.

It is super stable, and most (if not all) the kinks have been worked out over the couse of time.

Is this a parallel port setup?

A picture would be helpful to visualise what you are describing.

 
Thank you for your reply!

I don't think the GUI and/or the connection method matters much in this situation - it's more of a HAL question than anything else - but if you're curious, I'm retrofitting a Carvera Air desktop mill, details can be found here , it's a bog-standard 3-axis Cartesian machine for all intents and purposes. Probing is the last part before the setup can be called functional.

I don't know what kind of picture would be helpful here, so I'll try to explain better.

The machine has a tool setter/TLO sensor on the bed, it's a spring-loaded button that closes the contact when pressed.
There's also a probe that you clamp in the spindle to touch off the top of the stock, again, it closes the contact when the tip of it is pressed.

I need to measure the length of the probe using the tool setter. If I move the probe down against the button and trigger the measurement when just the tool setter button closes the contact, I get an inaccurate reading - the probe tip requires additional ~0.05mm of travel before it triggers (I'm wondering - is it maybe common to ignore this error? That would explain a lot). So the length needs to be measured when both the probe and the tool setter contacts close. I can combine the HAL inputs with boolean AND operation, feed the result into motion.probe-input, and it works perfectly.

However, after doing that I need to touch off the stock with the probe, and that quite obviously doesn't work with ANDed inputs - the tool setter button is not pressed when the probe triggers against the stock (unless I reach out and press it down with my hand but that's obviously not a solution). The same goes for measuring the end mill length.

I can replace AND with OR, and then I can measure my end mills and touch off the stock, but I lose the ability to accurately determine the probe length, as described above.

I don't mind writing a new HAL component if needed, but I don't know how to isolate the situation of measuring the probe. There's motion.motion-type pin, as I've discovered recently, so maybe I can cook up something based on that, in combination with the fixed tool number for the probe, but I'm not sure if motion.motion-type would be set to 4 (tool change) when tool length measurement is happening, I guess I'll have to experiment.