Probe T#not mounted...

[orbscan]

I'm sorry, Dave...
I feel uncomfortable asking this question...
I have little experience...

You said:

I don’t understand why the first thing people try is the center finding routine…. Well I actually do understand, it’s the same character flaw that caused me as a kid to choose for my first plastic model kit an aircraft carrier…. ;-) thankfully, there were no space shuttle models available then.

This is my case

OK, let’s get started -

1) Probe input line - does the big green probe led light on the probing page when you trigger the probe by pushing on the probe shaft?
And the LED is off when the probe is not triggered?
Assuming these are correct, we go on...


SO FAR NO PROBLEM


2) is the probing lib alive?
Use the settings-common page, Probe Ver button - this calls the probing lib, gets the lib version and displays in the line at the top of the screen. You should see a message like "MachStdMill Probing v0.XX".

That exercises all the screen to lib software linkages etc - it just doesn't cause any motion.


SO FAR NO PROBLEM

3) Let’s start with some slow but reasonable probing set up parameters.

Please set the probing input params as shown in the screen shot below - this will get us working off a common input parameter set in case of trouble.


The probe tool number does not have to be 250 - that's just what I happen to use. What is important is that whatever you have set as the probe tool number, has to be the currently mounted tool. Anything else will result in an error as MSM won't do a probe operation without the probe tool mounted. IT also won’t let you start the spindle when the probe tool is mounted (don’t ask what caused me to add that logic to MSM).
Note that I have set the "probe slow FR" parameter DRO to 0.
This disables the 2nd probing operation (see manual) - for now we want a simple, single probe operation for testing.
I also gave a fast probe rate of 10ipm – this is slow enough to be able to see and react to what is happening.

FYI – depending on the probe, slower feed rates can actually cause problems with switch bounce in the probe sequence. The symptom will be false triggering or only partial triggering of a G31 sequence.

To start , set the mach debounce interval (this the one used for the probe input filtering) to 100. This is a nice starting number. Later when all is well you can reduce this – clear down to 0 if you have a very clean, non-noisy system.


Here there are problems...

I get:

Probe T#not mounted...

How to mount the probe?

Thank you.
Best regards.
Carlo

[DaveCVI]

Hi,
To manually mount the probe tool (or any tool for that matter), use the mdi line.

"Mounting" involves two things:
1) physically mounting the tool in the spindle
2) logically mounting the tool (i.e. telling mach what tool is in the spindle)

This is done by doing a gcode tool change sequence. It's simple once you understand the gcodes involved -

Using the MDI line, enter T# M6 then press the enter key (where # is the number of the tool you want to mount). To mount the probe tool use the # for the probe tool (the number in the probe tool number DRO on the probing page tells Mach what # the probe tool is). If you were using my example values, the you would enter
T250 M6

When you press the enter key to start the MDI command, mach and MSM will go thru a tool change sequence, during the sequence you physically mount the tool, and the code begin run behind the scenes will tell mach (after the physical mounting process) what tool is logically mounted.

If you want tool length offsets applied by mach, after the tool change is done, return to the MDI line and enter
G43 H#
Where # is the same # as the T# you just mounted.
G43 says to mach: "apply TLO" and H# says "use the TLO value for tool table entry #".

Do NOT attempt to do T# M6 G43 H# all on one line! While that should be valid Gcode, mach will screw it up and crash the machine (this has been broken in mach since at least may 2011 - see item 4.27 in the MSM release notes for more info)

Dave

[orbscan]

Thank you very mach!

You are very kind Dave!

Carlo