Is there a way to find the middle (between the red lines) of a part with the touch probe? If not with the touch probe what would be the manual way?
Currently no probing routine that would automatically calculate that for you. Couple different ways to skin that cat though. Looks like you probably don’t want to hit that surface with cutting tools, but my quick and dirty way is to gently walk the tool up to the surface until you just touch it on each side and then divide by two. If you have an edge finder you can do it without marking the surface.
I have also used the touch probe, do your standard x or y probing routine to set zero on one side, then manually jog the probe to the surface on the other side and jog the machine in 0.0010" increments until you see the probe lights come on. That would be the other plane, and you divide that distance by two and you have your center.
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I’ve been using the probe to accomplish this by probing the different faces in different coordinate systems, G55, G56, etc., and comparing the zeros, but in this case you could just probe one side and measure the part width with calipers, if that’s precise enough for your needs.
Just be warned though, the software seems to kick you back into G54 after you’ve probed in a different coordinate and can be confusing or cause a crash. Also, I recommend probing the different sides of a known feature, like a 1-2-3 block to first determine that your probe is establishing the correct zero. As other’s have noted, I don’t find this to be correct until I reduced the ruby size, the deflection correction does not work for me. Hopefully the soon to be released software update will address these issues.
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A great feature would be to find the center of a single axis.
You can do what you’re looking for by doing a single axis touch probe routine and checking the machine coordinates. Then average the two and set your G54 to that value.
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Thank you all for the detailed responses. I was able to try each method with success. Having a canned cycle would be nice for this but the manual method works good. Thank you all again.
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