Can't use positive depth for drillcncjob command

Issue #588 new
S. Jansen created an issue

Hi there. First of all, thank you for this amazing project. I’ve been using v8.5 for a couple of weeks now and started to wonder if the current development version (v8.994) has some improvements. I see a new plotter, nice! Some bugs are fixed, great! Some commands are extended with extra parameters, even greater! (Some of the command parameters aren’t backwards compatible, though.) But my issue here is: some command parameters are suddenly limited.

What is happening

When using the drillcncjob command with a drillz=0 argument (like drillcncjob -drillz 0.0 -travelz 2.5), I get the warning: “The Cut Z parameter is zero. There will be no cut, aborting.” and the command is cancelled.

When using the drillcncjob command with a drillz>0 argument (like drillcncjob -drillz 1.0 -travelz 2.5), I get the warning: "The Cut Z parameter has positive value. It is the depth value to drill into material.
The Cut Z parameter needs to have a negative value, assuming it is a typo therefore the app will convert the value to negative. Check the resulting CNC code (Gcode etc)." and the command is executed but with a negative value for drillz.

What I expected to be happening

When using the drillcncjob command with a drillz=0 argument (like drillcncjob -drillz 0.0 -travelz 2.5), the command should produce a CNC Job output with a minimum depth of 0.0.

When using the drillcncjob command with a drillz>0 argument (like drillcncjob -drillz 1.0 -travelz 2.5), the command should produce a CNC Job output with a minimum depth of 1.0 (positive value).

When using the drillcncjob command with a drillz>travelz argument (like drillcncjob -drillz 5.0 -travelz 2.5), the command may give an error depending on your algorithm. If the algorithm can handle moving the CNC head upwards when ‘drilling’, just let it create the CNC Job. If the algorithm can’t handle moving the CNC head up when ‘drilling’, than I should expect an error. But I don’t expect that an algorithm should crash on this.

Some of us use these “weird” values to get the job done 😉

If you still want to prevent people from possibly damaging their CNC machine, maybe just give a warning popup instead of blocking the whole command. But please make this popup configurable so it is possible to disable such warnings 🙂

Comments (1)

  1. Marius Stanciu

    Hi,
    The Tcl commands are not very high on my priorities but I get your point. Initially I’ve added this limitation because my idea is to limit things that can go wrong but in the meantime I arrived to the fact that there is no replacement for knowing what you have to do.
    In any case I fixed this behavior for the Tcl command drillcncjob in my latest commit done in my working place: https://bitbucket.org/marius_stanciu/flatcam_beta/commits/
    Sources here: https://bitbucket.org/marius_stanciu/flatcam_beta/get/Beta_8.995.zip

    Below you can see the sequence of going from a positive value drillz= 2.0 and going in steps of 0.5 toward 0.0.

    And from Travel Z = 3 to drillz = 2

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