How common are missed steps?

[Aiph5u (Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))]

Hey Alex, hey all,

@Dr-Al

People need to understand the differences between homing and zeroing. You don’t need accurate homing to restart a job that was aborted. What you need is an accurate zero. […]

However it can be done just as easy (unless your project is using the who area of the 1F cutting area. If I’m going to be making a very long cut what I do is mount a block to the spoilboard that’s not a part of the project. I mount it in the front left corner. The block is the same thickness as the wood I’m using for the project and is mounted 3" closer to the front and 3" closer to the left. Unless things go terribly wrong the no bits will touch this block. As long as the block isn’t unscrewed or the project isn’t unclamped I can simply zero off of the block over and over again with the touch probe.

Yes, thank you for mentioning it here also, it has already been discussed from time to time and also recently. I think it would be a good thing to make the “zeroing on a block away from workpiece or on a jig” a part of a e.g. howto for beginners. At the moment it’s spread around in the forum.

@Aiph5u

@PezWoodworks

[…] after homing at startup I almost always Probe XYZ on the corner of two X/Y permanent fences on my wasteboard that I use to butt all my jigs (cut by the CNC) up against. […] So, although the stall homing isn’t perfect, is there something I’m missing by not having the upgraded sensors??

You are totally right. By using the XYZ Touch probe, you bypass the stall homing inacuracy, as discussed e.g. in this thread the other day

@Aiph5u

On a Standard Series Onefinity CNC machine, there are two ways to get acceptable positioning repeatability: Either

1. Retrofitting inductive proximity sensors as limit switches or
2. using the Three-axis Touch Probe instead of inaccurate stall homing, either on a fixed block or jig, or on the workpiece itself, and subsequently only relying on the workpiece coordinates.

@Aiph5u

what @ChrisM suggested above, is to clamp a block somewhere on your workarea, that can be left permanently there, away from your work, and to use the touch probe on this block in order to substitute homing with a more reliable method. Unlike when using stall homing, this block never moves and repeatability should be excellent.

@Dr-Al

What Derek is doing is the way to take advantage of the Elite’s homing switches.

At that stage Derek @WaywardWoodworker used no Elite switches, but retrofitted the ones shown to the buildbotics-based Onefinity Controller, which are inductive proximity sensors similar to the ones Tom @TMToronto used (that are mentioned above) or the Omron E2B I bought.