I am trying to work out how to position my job using the jog controls. However, it won’t let me jog to the left. My machine is a cheap one, with no limit switches, so there is no hard-limit anywhere on the device, and the position of the origin is arbitrary. I can use the jog controls to move to the right and upward, because I set my origin to the front left, but as my laser head is already somewhere in the middle of the workspace and thinks that is 0,0, the jog controls won’t allow me to go to the left, or to go into negative coordinates. I’ve tried the different settings for machine origin, job origin, Set origin, clear origin, and none help.
I don’t have a hardware jog control, or limit switches, so this would mean I have to use a different program to jog the laser head carefully all the way back to the bottom left, then turn off the CNC, unplug the USB (it doesn’t reset if the USB is left in), then restart everything. That’s a bit annoying.
Part of the problem is that when I hit the home button (accidentally instead of “Move to 0,0”), my machine does a Z-home, looking for a touch sensor, but I don’t have one, so I have to turn the machine off to stop it grinding into the bottom of the Z axis. Once that happens, it’s five minutes of mucking around with other programs and unplugging and replugging everything several times, refocusing the laser for the new z position, etc! Sounds like I’m going to have to upgrade the machine for a better solution.