Originally Posted by
saabaero
Let me start by explaining the reason for G54, G55, G56... offsets for those that might not know.
Suppose you had a part that you want to make 3 of that are spaced 4 inches apart using the same piece of stock. You can just set your G54 (default work offset system) origin at 0,0,0 and then move 4 inches in the +X direction, activate G55 work offset coordinate system, and set that point to zero. Lastly you would then move 4 inches again in the +X , activate G56 and then set that point to zero. Then you can run the same program and just alternate between activating G54, G55 and G56 work offsets.
With that in mind if you want to find the relationship of a hole center with respect to the part origin (e.g. bottom left corner) you could activate the G54 work offset and set X0, Y0 to the part lower left corner. Next you would activate G55 as the current work offset coordinate system and probe to set the center of the hole to zero. Without moving the machine you would then switch back to the G54 origin and the display would show the current (hole center) location with respect to G54 (part lower left corner). Since PathPilot wants to set the hole center that it finds to zero the main purpose is to switch to another work offset system so the lower left corner origin doesn't get overwritten. Any work offset G56, G57, and etc. would work fine for this purpose.
MACH 3 was simpler than PathPilot in that you could probe the center of a hole and display those coordinates without setting the hole center to zero. In PathPilot you can only probe to set the center of the hole to zero.
Hope that helps explain things a little better.
Oh, and one other thing I don't like about PathPilot... That is that there doesn't seem to be any way to manually edit the work offset table by just changing values in the table. To set the offsets one has to physically move the machine to the new location, activate the new work offset system and set 0,0,0.