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History It all started about six months ago when some CNC tinkering friends and I were Skyping away late one night and came up with the idea to collaborate on a touch probe project. As is often the case, this resulted in MrBean doing 95% of the work and 6 months later he sent me his working prototype, based on Graham Stabler's Renishaw probe copy here (indoor flyer). The details of MrBean's project and plans for it can be found on this cnczone thread . The main problem with the homemade Renishaw ‘ball type’ probe which both MrBean and I banged our heads against, was their propensity to stick in the open state. The principle of these probes is to have 3 radially placed conductive pins resting in the nooks of 3 pairs of ball bearings, the pin forming a contact between each ball pair.
The "One Penny" Touch Probe
Better Mousetrap: To get around the really slow digitizing speed I wrote my own digitizing algorithm. It is an adaptive feed plane method of sorts. Not sure if it is how they would do it in industry but it has seriously speeded up the process.
Homebrew touch probe
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