After a near miss on my tool setter / MicroArc today (because I forgot to load the tool) I thought of a suggestion.
Have a minimum safe height for the head when measuring tool length. Could be helpful if the tool doesn’t load from the tool changer, if the tool breaks, or if you forget to load the tool like me and the head is stopped only by a quick operator that hears crushing 3D printed MicroArc chip guard. I got lucky and it didn’t hit the ETS but it was close.
It could be a button on the ETs setup page. You just crank the head as far down as you can over the ETS (without touching anything ) and that’s as far down as the head goes when measuring tool length and then throws an error if it gets there.
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We can enable this ourselves right now but it requires we modify the ETS probing routine file that I noted in the other thread for adding an air blast to clear chips off the surface
Requirements:
- You need a current tool length in the tool table
- If there isn’t one, then maybe manual intervention is required / force a prompt on the operator?
- At what tolerance of a difference to the measured length do you want PP to halt?
The existing probing template, as mentioned in the thread where I found how to force an air blast would need to be modified.
The probing command has additional arguments:
G37 H~ P~
PathPilot manual for G37:
P~ is positive or negative tolerance. It measures the tool length, but, instead of storing it in the tool table, compares it to the length in the tool table. If the difference exceeds the P tolerance, the G-code program stops. You could use this to detect broken or improperly inserted tools that are not fully seated in the spindle, for example.
Have to then confirm that PP will stop executing GC if a G37 cycle is passed a P value with a tool offset present in the table…does it halt the entire cycle or just that tool probe execution…
You just crank the head as far down as you can over the ETS (without touching anything ) and that’s as far down as the head goes when measuring tool length and then throws an error if it gets there.
Not needed. The machine already knows this value because that’s how it calculates the tool height. You have to measure that every time you power the machine to enable use of the ETS (maybe not for Ethercat machines?)
It should know that if it gets anywhere near that height + the “shoulder” height of a TTS or BT30 or whatever the minimum height is for the smallest unloaded tool holder, that something bad is about to happen and it probably needs to halt/eStop.