This morning, after a bit of fiddling, I made some wood chips on a refurbished CNC router, which now uses a TinyG. Everything worked fine. Then I worked with the owner on the new workflow. He pointed out some things that I had never considered (coming from a 3D printing background). The most important follows:
With his old machine, he would put his bit in place, then turn on the machine and he would set a sort of minimum Z (not sure of the terminology here such that the bit wouldn’t cut into the machine’s bed. He would then set the origin for his project, and begin cutting. The idea was to protect the bit from plowing into the machine’s bed.
Could something like that be done using TinyG? It seems like work coordinates are close to what I’m looking for. A (perhaps major) factor is that there are no home/limit switches on this machine.
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