This is an interesting idea. I have quite a bit of camera gear myself and know that these flash slave triggers are able to sync up to speeds of 1/1000th of a sec. Now when you are setting up a tool touch off macro you typically would setup the machine to rapid down to a known Z location. Then you set a slow feed for the rest of the distance when the sensor then becomes active looking for contact.
my machine has roughly 11,000 steps per inch set in Mach 3. Now if I setup the system to use a 3 IPM feed to plunge for the tool setup then I would end up with an error of 0.000005225 possible using this. Now I am no math wiz to correct me if I am wrong. Here is how I came up with this figure.
33,000 steps per min to get 3ipm motion 11,000 x 3
take that and divide by 60 to get steps per sec. 33,000 / 60 = 550 steps per sec.
now take 550 and divide by 1000 (sync speed of trigger) to get possible error 550/1000 = .55
This total of .55 means we have half of one step for possible error.
Now for my machine the resolution is .000095 for 1 step so this would equal 0.00005225 distance error using this trigger.
My mill is very small and setup for very precise milling using servo motors with a small work envelope (6"x5"x4"). The max rapid I have setup on my machine is around 50ipm but can rapid much faster if I wanted to but I am after resolution. For those of you with router machines the required accuracy is much much larger and I think if my math is right then this would be a very viable option. Worth investigating further for sure.
I would love to see this continued as this is interesting to me
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