Thomas,
Apologies for writing a book on this one.
If you think about what you need to stack on the table to get to 500 lbs it pretty quickly becomes a bit ridiculous. For the 1500 a steel Saunders fixture plate + 4 Kurt DX6 vises is 400 lbs (and you’re out of X travel with 3 vises anyway). In normal use you will be hard pressed to get near the weight limit, so the question becomes why design for capacity not needed by >95% of customers and resultingly add cost to every machine? In fact, one of the first 1500 customers was an injection molding company doing degating of parts around ipad sized. Their fixtures are all steel, around 12" x 18" x 6" with 4-8 cylinders clamping the parts and they’ve had no issues with weight capacity.
Wireless probing has long been a requested feature by all our customers and every wireless probe system above hobby level has a “did you wake up?” signal that must be confirmed before we allow the probe/ETS to start doing it’s thing (though we allow rapid movement before we see that signal) that no wired probe/ETS has the ability to respond to. One major aspect of why wired probes/ETS’s are not compatible with the 1500 is that on both the hardware and software sides there were decisions made on “what do we need?” vs “what would be nice?” to limit the scope of the largest project the company has ever done.
The software changes to Pathpilot were extensive for the 1500, which is why 2.11 has been an exclusive release for 1500’s, and post 1500 launch the dev team’s focus has entirely been on re-unifying Pathpilot for all machines with 2.12. Once that is released (soonTM) then there will be some breathing room for other projects. We have not ruled out the possibility of compatibility of wired probes/ETS’s for the 1500 but we also have a year+ backlog of “other projects” for consideration. If this is one that you feel strongly about then I’d recommend submitting a feature request ticket here (yes, we do actually read those). Customers giving us feedback via feature request tickets are part of consideration on priority of work for the dev team.
I’ll add one note on policy of third party accessories, we’ve always maintained that once a customer purchases a machine from us, they own it and can add whatever they want to the machine be it a probe, tool setter, 5th axis table (I’d love to see this one), etc. However, Tormach will not provide assistance to customers to do so, it is a DIY adventure. Similarly, consideration during machine design does not take compatibility of 3rd party accessories into account. That sounds a bit harsh, but the other side of the coin is that we don’t do anything to lock our customers out of making any changes they wish, they just have to go digging a bit.
An overview of the wireless probe system is being worked on, but I’m not sure when exactly that will be released. Davie covered the batteries, which are 1/2 AA’s, otherwise in large part functionality of the wireless probing system is no different to a wired tool setter or spindle probe. We implemented a lot of the functionality needed for the wireless portion in ways that you won’t have to take any extra steps. Eg, if you call tool 99 into the spindle, whether the probe is in the spindle or not as long as the receiver can see it it automatically turns the probe on and also turns it off when you call a different tool or tool 0 for emptying the spindle. And for the ETS if you touch off a tool it also automatically comes on. There are new M codes for manual activation/deactivation if needed for whatever reason, but most people would never use them. If the ETS or probe isn’t seen in 10 seconds then Pathpilot gives an alarm saying so to stop the machine.
Not specific to the wireless probing system, but I also wrote a suite of probing macros designed for integration into CAM software post processors and those are already integrated into the SprutCAM and Fusion360 posts. Our manual probing routines are not at all suited for use with anything but UI buttons. David Loomes’s probing macros also already did exist and still function perfectly fine but were very much hard coded to be used only with Fusion and the point of my macros was to make them software agnostic. My macros currently only update work coordinates, at some point I may do a v2 that can be used for tolerance inspection.
Thank you,
Norman
