Hey Jim,
unfortunately Carbide Create lets you hang here with unusable tool change commands, because they want you to buy a machine of theirs and that you run their machine software. It’s only then that the broken commands get fixed later by Carbide Hardware and Software.
However, there is a solution, this was already answered (you possibly would have found some of them by searching for “carbide tool change” or “carbide M6”. But of course not if everyone typed “CC” instead of “Carbide Create” ):
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…and after that (after the ‘tool change’ commands were manually edited to make them work), the next step is to make the ‘tool-change’ behaviour suit your needs. For this, the Onefinity Controller has a ‘tool-change’ field in which the user does this themself, because everyone has different needs. You can find
→ an easy instruction for this here.
PS: I think some people also wrote automatic scripts already to convert Carbide Create G-code to make the tool-change commands work on the fly, that would not be difficult e.g. with sed, but if you are dealing with only two or a few milling bits that you have to change within one g-code program, it’s easy to do that manually using a plain text editor.
If you follow the instructions above, you will be prompted with the tool number used in your program with a popup window and asked for confirmation before it continues.
As mentioned above, you can modifiy the behaviour, but in general, when you followed the instructions above, when your g-code program is started and a tool insertion is necessary, the spindle is halted and the VFD puts it into the ‘Safe Torque Off’ mode (STO), and a popup appears with the tool number and tells you to insert this bit, then after your confirmation it tells you to attach and put the touch probe underneath the bit, after confirmation probes tool length (Z probing) automatically, and after one more confirmation resumes your g-code program at the right position by powering up the spindle to the speed specified in your g-code program.
A difference in wanted behaviour is whether you have set your workpiece origin to workpiece top left corner, or to a lower workpiece corner. In the first case you put your touch probe on the top left corner of your workpiece, in the latter case you will be told to put the probe on the machine bed when spindle is at home position. This behaviour is altered by enabling or disabling one single commmand in the instructions above.