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Enhancement - tool change workflow improvements

Open repentsinner opened this issue 1 month ago • 1 comments

Hi, it would be great if the tool change workflow could be improved in the following ways:

  • Capture a tool change location in machine coordinates that gSender goes to prior to the change, similar to the location of the tool length probe. Retracting to safe and going to the same location should be the first step of any M6 override command
  • Allow the various tool change strategies to be executed outside of a job, either during setup, diagnostics, or just to learn how the different strategies work
  • Document the different strategies more completely directly in the UI
    • Ignore should likely warn that if a gcode program has an M6 in it and it is ignored, cutting results after the change are likely to be undefined.
    • Pause notes that if you move the bit, it needs to be moved back before resuming? This seems crazy from an expectation perspective (software is good at remembering coordinates, humans are not), and behavior does not seem to reflect this. Is this documentation out of date?
    • Standard re-zero makes note of a 'guided process', but prior to running it there is no way of knowing what that process is. There is so much space in the UI to directly describe the process, instead of hoping that a user is going to find a manual.
    • Flexible re-zero seems less flexible than Standard re-zero. Saved tool offsets on hobby-grade CNC? Where are these offsets saved?
    • Fixed tool sensor is sort of described, and I have a bitsetter, but the machine went rogue and did not successfully recover the pre-change position when trying to execute this once so now I don't trust it. See desire above to allow the tool change strategies to be executed outside of a job so we can debug what the heck they are doing.
  • Note that if on the tool change page of the settings dialog and you navigate to a different page and back, a bunch of the help text is inexplicably removed.

Version 1.4.7 on MacOS talking to grbl (shapeoko 5 pro).

Thanks for considering!

repentsinner avatar May 22 '24 06:05 repentsinner