I have been running with the original version of path pilot that shipped with my 1100MX over a year ago… I’ve just recently made the mistake of updating to the newest path pilot. I’ve been able to work out most of the issues, except the rectangular boss probing routine, where I’m wanting it to find the center of the boss, is not retracting far enough away from the boss, after it touches the stock with the probe.
so for example, when i have a 1 in by 6 in boss of stock material being cut with my cheap Chinese bandsaw, the cut edge comes out slightly angular… therefore, when I run the path pilot rectangular boss probing routine on that not-square stock, the probe tip crashes into the stock because path pilot is not retracting the tip away from the material far enough.
this was not an issue in the path pilot version I had from over a year ago.
is there any way to fix this? some hidden setting somewhere where I can have path pilot retract further away from the material after each probe touch?
any constructive advice is much appreciated!
(no, i can not afford a better band saw)
thank you in advance.
P.S. I would share a video of this, however, crashing a probe tip on purpose is not something I’m willing to do. lol. hopefully I described it well enough that you all understand what’s going wrong
do you know which version of pathpilot you were running before?
if this is limiting your productivity you can roll pathpilot back to the previous version. This can be done by going to update > browse >previous version (I’m not in front of my machine so this might be of a little bit that should get you close)
if you start the probing routine a little further away from the workpiece will that provoke pathpilot to retract further for these moves?
if you trip the Probe during a probing routine unexpectedly, then you are not in danger of damaging the Probe tip.
There haven’t been any changes to the built in probing routines that I know of in years. To my knowledge they’ve always been set to retract by the radius of the probe tip diameter from the tool table.
Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the version number before I updated… and I can’t afford to roll back, because I’ve already lost 2 hours today getting Dropbox working again, definitely can’t waste any more time on that, honestly, it was a miracle that I got it working at all… lol
I did try starting the probe at varying distances from the part, but unfortunately it seems like path pilot is defaulted to less than 1/8" retraction from the part after the first probe touch… I was hoping there was a secret “ADMIN” command or a way to use Gedit to modify the routine.
Honestly, thinking that the “easy” way to solve this is to use Fusion to generate WCS probing routines instead of doing them manually myself… but since I turn my machine off every night, I can’t trust the machine coordinates to be consistent enough, without maybe doing an initial WCS probing off the corner of my vice, and then having it go and probe the stock material… but then the stock material has to be correctly positioned in the 3D model within the vise, which right now I don’t do because that’s also a huge waste of time, haha. and i don’t have a 3D model of the vise, because like the bandsaw, its also Chinese garbage, lol.
do you know if there’s any way to change that to two or three times the diameter of the probe tip? I’ve never had this issue until just this past weekend when I updated path pilot. I’ve been using the same junk bandsaw for over a year now with no issues… very confusing, lol
For the centering routine, just can fudge it by just increasing the probe diameter in the tool table. For any non-centering routine, not without rewriting the retracts throughout the probing programs, which I would discourage anyone from doing if you are not familiar with macro programming.
For what it’s worth, the MX (non 1500) machines use hard stop homing which is repeatable to about 0.0004"
I run parts on the showroom machines without resetting the WCS every morning.
That is very interesting, as i’ve seen deviations up to 0.040" especially on the Z-axis. But, if i carefully setup the automatic WCS probing routine correctly, i should be able to account for that much.
