Feature Request: Work Coordinate Rotation in Pathpilot

Is it possible in Pathpilot to rotate your Work Coordinate system beyond the G10 L2 command? Sometimes I have a flip on a part and need to clock the part. I would rather probe a feature such as a hole or boss for the origin and then another feature to clock the coordinate system versus spending time aligning the part in X and Y. I can manually do this by probing locations of features, and then doing some math to give me a vector direction (R#), but would rather have the machine rotate the coordinate system for me. I am suggesting a feature addition to Pathpilot since I don’t think it exists, but I am not sure how many people benefit.

@Tim_Wender you could write something custom in G code or even in a subroutine that you could call from MDI (SUBROUTINES REFERENCE).

Depending on your CAM preference you could also handle probing and resultant coordinate setting in CAM. This video is a few years old but is a nice example from a Tormach user in Fusion: Fusion 360 CAM for probing angles - YouTube

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@Rogge Thanks! I’ll give it a look

Wish I’d spotted this when it was posted - sorry to be late.

I originally did this using Mach3. When I switched to PathPilot a couple of years back, I did attempt to replicate it, but encountered a couple of problems that stopped me from keeping the results.

Firstly, when you turn rotation on using G10 L2 P0 Rx, something goes wrong with the x, y, z DROs. They get stuck in inches and don’t obey G21. The number of digits after the point changes, but the values are inches.

Second problem I found was that many of PathPilot’s built in probing routines don’t function and randomly throw errors to the extent that the requested move will exceed the axis limits.

Third problem was that although G38.x moves function in the rotated coordinate system as you’d expect, the returned results from the probe are in non-rotated coordinates which makes subsequent updates to the WCS offsets a bit challenging to say the least.

Then there’s a big difference between Mach3 and LinuxCNC. Mach 3 rotates the machine axes, so affects all WCSs the same. Linux CNC has the rotation separate for every WCS. That makes Fusion’s ability to drive the probe in one WCS and use the results to update another truly challenging!

In the end, I implemented Fusion’s axis rotation probe operations right up to the point where they should be executing the G10 L2 and then stopped. It’s not a feature I really ever used on Mach3, so I didn’t find it a major loss.

@David_Loomes What is your general best method when flipping a part to pick up on geometry if your part has no flat edge to clock the part? I typically get stuck making soft jaws. I would rather flip it and hold it down with a clamp and then clock the part by selecting an origin and subsequent feature.

Do you mean in cases where there may be rotational errors involved? I’ve most often found it best to go back and think harder about the fixturing to try to avoid that kind of situation!

@David_Loomes thanks for spelling these out. I have logged these as issue with the PathPilot dev team.

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I know this is an old thread but I’d like to +1 it. Definitely a super useful feature.

@David_Loomes my appologies for such a late notice, but the issue you pointed out was resolved in PP 2.9.3 (release notes) but we are now on V2.9.6 (latest version)