Revision 2 of the development process. Optimizing the behavior to be more reliable, and speedy.
ER11 rack design file (Fusion 360):
To be used with 1/4“ steel dowels and 5/16“x3/4“ compression springs around the pins (makes the whole rack spring loaded). Drill clearance holes for wood screws to mount it, use long screws. Set the height of the rack by moving the spindle and touching off, then hand tighten.
I will post the LinuxCNC Gcode remap code soon but need to change it to be more standard (my machine currently uses table Z0 instead of Z0 as safe height). Also I am separating the functions so you can use just the rack with manual collet tightening, with or without height measurement. Should be a good in-between step between here and full auto.
In this pass I added a probing strip to the tool rack itself so we can more quickly check the presence or absence of tool after get/put operations. Also other speed optimizations, mostly removing pauses left by active dev code.
Reduced overall cycle time by 70%. Full tool change with tool height sensing and automatic vacuum dust boot get/put at 72 seconds now.
Also changed the tool rack springs type and location to 3/8“x3/4“ lighter compression springs. This fixed a lot of issues with get/put that sometimes resulted in neighboring tools being popped out of their seats during ops.
Next step I believe will be integrating the collet wrench, collet closer socket, and tool height setter probe into a single assembly made from off-the-shelf cheap parts. This is in the interest of making integration simpler for adopters . The idea is to hopefully make it so no one needs to modify any code, just a few variables based on their machine and specific installation.