11-30-2009, 11:41 PM
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| | | Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: United States
Posts: 217
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Tool Changing Mid-Operation | |
I feel like a fool but I don't get the trick with tool-changing. I use CamBam to create the gcode for a series of operations that require a couple of different endmills. I assign them different tool IDs as part of the process. When I run the gcode, EMC2 prompts me to change the bits mid-operation at the right time as expected. It gives me the little "change the tool" dialog with a continue button. Pressing the continue button causes things to continue as expected.
The problem is that I don't have control over the machine at that point to actually change the endmill. I need to raise the z-axis to get the endmill into the collect and then I need to touch off the z-axis. Any help or walk through of this process would be great as it's currently driving me crazy.
I've tried pausing the operation with the dialog up but I still don't get manual control. I've also tried stopping the operation but I can't figure out how to get it to resume at the line where it left off properly. I know this is probably something super simple and I'm being a fool but it's got me stumped.
I've heard reference of a "go to line" ability somewhere but I've not seen how to use it. It seems horrible that I can't touch off in the middle of a running program. This is pretty critical for those of us that don't have a tooling that can be established in a tool table. I know this is available in Mach3.
Apparently there is also a "tool change position" that can be set somewhere - I'm assuming that can't be done via the Step Conf wizard so it must be in one of the configuration files. Setting it will be of little use if I can't conveniently resume the same file again.
Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
-Mike  |
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