- hello and welcome toanother haas tip of the day. now, this is our secondprobe troubleshooting video. today, we're goin to go through a handful of additional troubleshooting tips that will go a long way tomaking you a probing expert. now, in our first probing video, we look at the most common rootcauses of probing problems. things like low batteries, probe calibration, and probe macros.
today, we're going to look at some of the other things that cancause us grief when probing, and show you how to fix them. (machine whirring) now, when replacing thebatteries in your probes, remember, not all batteriesare created equal. be sure to use the type and brand of batteries recommended by renishaw. not all brands of batteries are suitable
for your haas probes. if you put the wrongbrand or type of battery into your probe, it just might not work. now, i've just changedthe batteries in my probe and it's time to putit back in the spindle, but i don't rememberwhich way it was oriented when i pulled it out. now this is why renishawrecommends that we dial in the tip of our probe towithin two and a half microns.
that's just one tenth ofa thousandth of an inch. that way if the probe gets pulled out and put in, in the opposite orientation, it won't affect our accuracy. now, if you're switching your machine between inch and metricmode, using setting nine, be sure to recalibrate your probe. if you don't recalibrate your probe, your machine's gonna give you an alarm,
just telling you thatyou have to recalibrate. now, all of our probe calibration values are stored in the controlas macro variables. if we zero out all of ourglobal macro variables, we've just lost all of our calibration. if you've done this, no big deal, just go ahead and recalibrate your probes. along these same lines, if you zero out all of your tool length offsets,
you'll have zeroed outthe tool length offset for your spindle probe as well. now, if you've got a next gen control, they've given us a new feature, a way of protecting the tool length offset for our spindle probe. all you have to do isto find your tool type for your spindle probeas a type seven probe. then, if we press the origin key
and arrow down to cleartool offsets except probe, and make that selection, it'll zero out all ofyour tool length offsets, while protecting the offsetfor your spindle probe. this is a nice feature. now, here's a probingissue that you're likely to run across at some point. i've loaded a seven anda half inch diameter slug of aluminum into a viceand placed it on my mill.
now, all i wanted todo was probe the center and write that value to a work offset, so i went to my offset page, i followed the on-screen instructions, filled in all the blanksin order to probe a boss, but when i hit cycle start, my probe didn't probelike it was supposed to. it took a few points and thengave me a probe fail alarm. probe fail, what is that?
well, does that mean weneed to replace the probe, thousands of dollars? no. the root cause is a lotless sinister than that. all this meant was thati wasn't close enough to the center of my partwhen i hit the green button. now, to fix this, we're just going to use a machinist scale and a permanent marker. we're gonna find a better approximation
for the center of that part. i'll jog my probe above it. we'll run the cycle again andsee if it fixes our problem. (machine beeping) so far, so good. it's made it past thepoint it failed last time. that's it. it wrote to my work offsetand all we had to do to avoid that alarm was find a
better approximationfor our starting point. now, if you walk up to your machine and you don't know what toolnumber your spindle probe is, you can find out pretty easily. just look at your macro variables page and look at macro variable 560. this is gonna contain the toolnumber of your spindle probe. right now, this machineis set up as tool 10. if we wanted to set ourspindle probe as tool 24,
we can do that pretty easily. all we have to do is popout the spindle probe, put it back in the machineas tool 24, and recalibrate. the control is going toupdate macro variable 560 automatically duringthe calibration process. now, we're back up front in our demo room. we're going to give you another tip here, something you need to beaware of when probing. now, all these tips are related to
troubleshooting yourwireless probing system. the key word there is wireless. our table probes and ourspindle probes communicate with our omi, our machineinterface, using infrared. that signal is line of sight, meaning that our table and our spindle probes need to be able to see the omiin order to communicate. if something gets in the way, it's gonna block that signaland we're gonna have problems.
now, the top culprits thatcauses this interference are tall fixtures, rotaries and trunnions, and sometimes, it's just thatwe haven't cleaned the glass on our probes and our omi. now, with our table probe,we've got some simple solutions. we can move that probefrom one side of the table to the other, if that'sgonna solve our problem. if the table probe is just toolow, too close to the table, we actually sell a probe riser block
that'll give us some more clearance so the signal can get upand over that fixture. just be sure to recalibratethat table probe when you're done. for the spindle probe, wehave a little more difficulty. you just simply have tomake sure that fixtures and your rotaries are placed in a position where they don't block the signal. worst case scenario,you can buy longer tips
for that spindle probe. now, if your problem is just concentrated coolant and chips building upon your omi and your probes, that's easy also. just take a clean soft clothand wipe off those windows, and this something we shouldbe doing on a regular basis. well, that's it for today'sprobe troubleshooting tips. now, we do have some cool stuff for you in today's bonus content, sobe sure to check that out.
and for tip of the day videos, be sure to subscribe tothis youtube channel. thanks for watching thishaas tip of the day.