Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

I am about to get my mill back up and running with a M400 control and while going through the control manual, I could not quite figure out how the tool change position is made so when some post processed code calls out a M6, the mill will know to rapid over to some predetermined place to make it convienient for me to manually change to the next tool.

Chapter 4 talks about height offsets and using the longest tool as a reference tool. Thats great, but not quite what i am looking for.

Chapter 10 talks about Intercon and I see that there appears to be a sub menu called "Tool Functions" that is activated by using "F4". That particular menu shows some information that allows a user to input X and Y positions for a particular tool when a tool change is called out.

The part I am confused over is that it seems like that feature only shows up in Intercon and not the regular setup > tool menu. I run Fusion 360 exclusively and really have no desire to use conversational programming to design my tool paths.

The default manual tool change does not include any X/Y movement.

You can write a custom M6 macro, and write into it any X/Y movement you want. That macro would then be called (instead of the default action) whenever the CNC program does an M6.

The simplest M6 macro might say:
That would turn off the spindle and coolant; move all three axes to the first return point (G28); then do the default M6 (which prompts for the new tool and waits for the operator to press Cycle Start).

You can set the G28 location under the Part Setup menu: F1/Setup -> F1/Part -> F9/WCS -> F1/Return. It is in machine coordinates (distance from machine zero), and so is independent of where you might have part zero set. A good place on a toolroom mill might be about halfway along X; Y0 (all the way to front); and Z0 (all the way up).

See Chapter 13 for some information about custom M function macros. If you are using CNC11 Mill software, then a custom M6 would be in the file c:\cncm\mfunc6.mac. If you are using CNC10, it is /cncroot/c/cnc10/cnc10.m6. If you are using CNC7, it is C:\CNC7\CNC7.M6.

Thanks for the help!