Installing a Wildhorse Innovations Econo-Probe / Touch probe.
To make the installation quick and painless I choose to purchase a pre-wired stereo headphone cable from Radio Shack, PN 42-2492. The cable is 8 feet long and only 3-4 feet are needed so I cut the cable in half. The cable I purchased had the RED wire attached to the tip, the BLACK wire attached to the middle ring and the bare wire (shield) attached to the lower body.
A quick check on the CG11 Break Out Board (BOB) installed in the control cabinet showed only one input available, #15. I attached the RED wire to that terminal and the BLACK wire to the common terminal that already had a green wire in it. I used one of the existing holes on the connector plate to get the cable in to the cabinet. That is it for wiring.
The MACH3 configuration needs to updated to activate the probe input. Under CONFIG / Ports & Pins / Inputs you will find the PROBE entry. Enter 15 for the pin number and click the check box to enable it, leave the red X's active low and emulated columns.
To check that the probe is working the RED LED on it should be OFF when not touching anything and turn on when just barely touched. Mine came on without being touched but I wiggled the probe tip around a couple times and cleaned off whatever crud was on the contacts. On the MACH3 Diagnostics screen you should see the PROBE indicator turn on and off when you touch / release the probe. If you got the wires backwards the indicator in Mach3 will work but the LED on the probe won't.
Calibrating the probe is tedious as you have to adjust 3 set screws to align the probe to be centered under the spindle. WildHorse includes the procedure in the manual so I won't go over it here.
Once everything is installed and calibrated all you need is some probing software for Mach3. There are several versions out there. I tried a couple but decided to start with the screenset Hoss came up with last year. However there are a couple problems with it. Don't even think about using while your display has Machine Coordinates active it will move the axises in the wrong direction more often than not. It also assumes the machine is in G90 mode (absolute moves) but after probing it leave the machine in G91 mode (relative moves) so if you probe twice in a row the machine may move much further than expected. I re-wrote some of the code to solve the problems permanently but my code isn't quite ready for prime time yet. When it is I will likely post a a screen set with probing and a couple other features I am working on.
With everything together and running it sure is a pleasure to have the machine align itself over various features on what is being machined. Finding an edge, corner, center of a hole or center of a block are quick and easy. I will be working out using the probe to set tool height next.
Charlie.