I want to use a ball mill with a diameter 2mm wider than that of the shaft to mark the placement of a hole in the side of my part. Is there a way I can do that, or do I need to calculate the center coordinates of the hole so I can edit the file to manually add the movement?
With a few of the parts I can rotate them, but that always leaves the potential of not having the origin in the right spot. For most parts my CNC does not fit the part in that orientation.
As a side note, are there any plans to support tools with more esoteric geometries?
The drill operation has a marking checkbox so that you can use any bit to mark, but not drill, holes. Would that work? At present, there is still no individual hole selection (on the todo list).
Marking works great for the horizontal faces, but doesn’t register anything on the vertical faces. This makes sense generally, but it would be cool to have the capacity for the program to realize that with a bit that has an end wider than the shaft, it could make cuts into the side of the piece.
It seems like that may be really tricky to implement though. It would be nice to be able to find the machine coordinates of a feature by selecting it, that would save me a lot of measuring and math when manually editing the Gcode.
As for esoteric geometries, I mean things like bits with a profile wider than the shaft. I can put the dimensions in for things like a dovetail bit, it gets treated like an end mill with the diameter of the wide base. I also use bits with spherical end geometries that get treated as ball end mills. I get by with using trace, but there isn’t always a feature to trace.
Overall this is by far the best program I’ve used, so keep up the great work!
I will add it as a