On some commercial machines I’ve seen have a static z-indexer/probe, a ”push-button” -type plate near the 0,0 of the table. Seems handy. Like this: around 11.26. Could it be made with OB Control and a xyz-probe plate? Workflow could be: 1. Home the device 2. Move to a prefined spot (the xyz-plate), but not change work coordinates 3. Change endmill 4. Attach probe cable to endmill 5. Probe z 6. Continue work
Yes but You will need to figure out the difference in height between the sensor and the table and use that in the probing macro. Your Gcode must always be referenced from the table, you can never do a reference from the top of the material. For unusual jobs you cannot use it since you will need to refer to some part of the job rather than the table. Like this one where I attached the back of a model airplane radio to the machine and then removed about 0.6mm from the sides of the battery bay to make this lithium polymer battery fit. No references, no drawings of the radio to work from, very little clearance. MY Z moves 90mm and the radio is about 50mm thick, so I had to jog carefully around the middle part to miss it, no automatic homing type moves allowed as that would certainly have hit something.
I could workaround those issues. I often have the z0 of my models set to the bottom/spoilboard surface, and if I don’t, I could manually enter the material thickness as Z0 when I know where the spoilboard top is.
