Thoughts after a few months tinkering with BB and observing other controllers
Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2019 11:13 am
A few things that at this moment in my limited experience I'd like to see. I have been pouring over CNC router how tos, forums, and have enough experience on my current machine I am starting to get a feel for what to incorporate in the next one. Also, disclaimer, I might be doing something fundamentally wrong here or unaware of an existing solution so please enlighten me :)
Native "one click" support for corner touchplates in the web interface. The corner finders are pretty popular (like this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07793FGWG ) and a lot of the controllers seem to have the functionality built in for them. This should be a couple buttons on the main interface screen, and an admin page for the touplate settings/sizes. Z-thickness of course, and then be able to select between corner finding by outside edge of the plate, or center of the circle, defining widths of the edges/circle in the setup.
Network access to the file system. Just to be able to quickly manipulate the gcode files remotely. Not a huge deal but seems like a handy little thing.
"Return to home" shortcut button on the main control screen to run the spindle back to 0 without having to go punch it in MDI manually would be handy.
As I saw someone else mention, ability load a program and then have it plot out the X/Y extremes at clearance height on the machine (maybe step through them with a button click). Just to make sure you've got things positioned right. I realize BB will throw a warning about boundaries but would be nice to be able to run through it and see.
While a program is running but paused, be able to save the state to resume later. Along these lines, before actually resuming running it, return to the last position. Here's my thought here, I'd had a couple of times where something started to go wrong during a lot cut process and needed to fix it - Namely bit slipping down in a worn out collet. If I "stop" the program, I have to start over completely. If I "pause" it, i can't manipulate the tooling position in order to fix the problem. Ideally, i wanted to pause the program, move the tool around to get working room, fix the bit, re-zero the axis, and then tell it to move back and resume running.
It would be nice to have a way to dial in the axis travel distances. I realize that the obvious answer is you can enter in all the required values in setup, but things aren't always perfect. For example, universal gcode sender has a pretty easy solution here. Tell it to travel a specified distance on an axis, measure the actual traveled distance, and then tell it how much it was off. When I first setup my machine before going to BB, I ran though this and found that at 200mm of travel, my X axis was about 2mm and Y 6mm off. Don't know why but it was dead on consistent, and correcting for this made it perfect.
Native "one click" support for corner touchplates in the web interface. The corner finders are pretty popular (like this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07793FGWG ) and a lot of the controllers seem to have the functionality built in for them. This should be a couple buttons on the main interface screen, and an admin page for the touplate settings/sizes. Z-thickness of course, and then be able to select between corner finding by outside edge of the plate, or center of the circle, defining widths of the edges/circle in the setup.
Network access to the file system. Just to be able to quickly manipulate the gcode files remotely. Not a huge deal but seems like a handy little thing.
"Return to home" shortcut button on the main control screen to run the spindle back to 0 without having to go punch it in MDI manually would be handy.
As I saw someone else mention, ability load a program and then have it plot out the X/Y extremes at clearance height on the machine (maybe step through them with a button click). Just to make sure you've got things positioned right. I realize BB will throw a warning about boundaries but would be nice to be able to run through it and see.
While a program is running but paused, be able to save the state to resume later. Along these lines, before actually resuming running it, return to the last position. Here's my thought here, I'd had a couple of times where something started to go wrong during a lot cut process and needed to fix it - Namely bit slipping down in a worn out collet. If I "stop" the program, I have to start over completely. If I "pause" it, i can't manipulate the tooling position in order to fix the problem. Ideally, i wanted to pause the program, move the tool around to get working room, fix the bit, re-zero the axis, and then tell it to move back and resume running.
It would be nice to have a way to dial in the axis travel distances. I realize that the obvious answer is you can enter in all the required values in setup, but things aren't always perfect. For example, universal gcode sender has a pretty easy solution here. Tell it to travel a specified distance on an axis, measure the actual traveled distance, and then tell it how much it was off. When I first setup my machine before going to BB, I ran though this and found that at 200mm of travel, my X axis was about 2mm and Y 6mm off. Don't know why but it was dead on consistent, and correcting for this made it perfect.