Center point home

[mauriceman]

Confucius say, "One man's SIMPLE! is another man's HUH?" What confused my tiny brain was that if a 1st tier menu item has a 2nd tier that flew out, all selections would be from that 2nd tier as in your advanced settings. Designing MMIs, operator interfaces or GUIs for all to equally understand is the goal but never quite reached.

Sorry to have you second guess your coding, and thanks for your help.

[SteveK]

Arrh! That makes sense, great so there's not a hidden bug. If you only have absolute selected it does nothing, If you want it to work like before leave that unchecked and just use the center start option.

Documentation is now within T2Laser, press Shift-F1 or select Manual from the Help menu.

Then you can easily search it, so for example, "absolute" brings you to this:

Center (Start Point)

o   Position the laser (and set home) in the center of the job (between extents) before starting
o   Absolute option uses the entire drawing from 0,0 to maximum extents for center position

So what does that mean, well previously I would take the extents of the drawing... min and max, then figure out the center by min + ((max - min)/2) but if you select absolute it will use 0 to max (or max/2).

e.g. for a drawing that starts at 50,50 and goes to 100,100. Center start alone would place the center at 75,75 but selecting absolute would place it at 50,50. This is also important when using the frame feature as one will frame 50,50 to 100,100 and the other 0,0 to 100,100. Big difference. As many features are, this was a user request.

So will this work with a circular pattern as well? Can I define where is the center point? I'm thinking of patterns like celtic knots. If I strip the background away in Inkscape will it find the center of the pattern?

Another unrelated question, would t2laser work if one of the axes were rotary and the other was longitudinal?
Hey, I'm a wood turner, this kind of stuff keeps me awake at night!
Thanks

Steve

[Zax]

It doesn't care about the shape, it just uses the extents and calculation I posted.

It should work but I'd need to see an example and your interpretation of the center.

Yes, T2Laser works with a rotary axis. Just set the correct steps per mm in the Grbl parameters.

[Agastar]

On trick I read recently was to set the page size in your vector editor to the circumference of your round object. 

[dirkentimmer]

Mystery solved. It was my oldtimers kicking in. I didn't realize that on the drop down menu both the first menu items could be checked and the fly-out items could also be checked. I was only checking the absolute item and not the primary centering one. That seems to be a little counter-intuitive from what I'm used to menu structure wise. So what does the absolute second item do?

Is there newer documentation explaining all these new features out there yet?

Again, thanks for your patience and assistance.

I can't my laser to start at the center of an image, too. I searched the forum for a solution and found this topic. In T2 I selected 'Center (start point)' and deselected the flyout option 'absolute'... but somehow I can't seem to deselect the options under 'Corner (start point)'. Always one of the options just keeps being selected, no matter what I do.
Anyone who can help me out?

[Zax]

You have selected center start and corner is disabled, that’s it. The sub menu isn’t in use.