Custom probe script, or other means of probing for center (Elite)

Accessories Touch Probe
1

I would like to be able to probe for the center of a workpiece using the XYZ touch probe on the Elite. I’m assuming that this feature is not already hidden somewhere in the Masso software.

The idea that comes to mind is to make my own version of the built-in probing routine, where I first probe for the bottom left corner of the work as usual, then probe for the top right - adding my probe’s offsets rather than subtracting, and finally average the two and set as zero (or save to a G54+ slot).

Does anyone have the source code for the original probing routine that I might build off of?

Other ideas for quickly finding center? I suppose this could all be done with a calculator and manually setting zero, but I would like to make this as easily repeatable as possible. Thanks!

Edit: does the built-in Masso probe window have a way of probing the top left corner of a workpiece? And can I get the absolute location from the probe window before it zeros the position? If so, doing this simply in an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t sound too tedious.

3

I believe Masso is also working on updating/improving their probing logic for an upcoming software release. Some of us have been asking for the ability to probe the centre of solid stock such as a cylinder.

4

Thanks for the replies - to follow up on this, I think that I’m onto an easy solution:

  • The bottom right corner of the work is up against a fence, so the offset is always a constant value
  • The top left corner can be probed using the XYZ touch block and saved to G54 in the Masso probing menu
  • From here, just simple math to get the average X and average Y

So this leaves me with two naive questions:

  • How would I write a simple gcode to take whatever is currently in G54, average it with my constant fence XY, and save the result to G55?
  • How do I move to/zero on G55 once saved? :sweat_smile:
5

Thanks, but I think that this is a different problem than I am trying to solve. I want to be able to find the center of a rectangular piece of wood, using the aluminum XYZ probe. I do not “know” the dimensions of the wood, in the sense that I will be doing this for multiple repetitions/pieces of varying dimensions, and do not want to pre-measure each one. See my comment above.

7

What about drawing an X from corner to corner and using a vbit to get the center point, that’s what I’m doing…

you could also set up a fence like i think i read you had… get the machine coords, probe the top right corner look at the machine coords, and do some math… ((top right x - bottom left x)/2) + bottom left x then same for y. Then enter the numbers you get in the mdi like this:
G0 G53 x###y###

Or save your fence location at like g57 or something, probe top right, then go to g57 or whatever, look at machine coords and again do math and jog it there based on your xy zero

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