Getting to the Origin

Yesterday, I heard a friend make a comment regarding setting up the start position on his DSP Commercial Laser Controller. I've heard others make similar comments, but was a little surprised when it came from him. So I asked him about it. The comment went something like this:

"I moved the object [in PHCad] near the origin before sending the job to the laser."

Why do I think that is a strange comment? Because it doesn't matter where the object is in PHCad, it is still going to be output at the origin as set on the laser. He said he had figure that out, but due to his history of working in Mach3, where the various coordinate systems (machine, software, etc.) are usually in agreement made it a habit for him and certainly molded his thinking.

Like I said, I have heard others make similar statements, so I suppose they are thinking in a similar fashion. End of story!

We, maybe not. Today, I was doing some playing in PHCad and in the Control Settings dialog, I noticed an option that I had never paid any attention to before. Mostly, I suppose, because the label and the option wording were not all that informative or intuitive.

The label is "Cut Mode" and the two options were "PanelLocation" and "SoftLocation".

The default setting is "PanelLocation" and that is exactly how I have used the software for the past year. I wonder what would happen if I changed it?

First I set up a job, downloaded it, and ran it. Worked just like it always had. Nothing surprising here.

Then I changed the setting to "SoftLocation", downloaded it again, and ran it again.

Whoa!!! What happened here? The job ran just fine, but first, the laser head moved as if the Origin had been changed.

It moved it to the point necessary to run the job in the position it was in PHCad's workspace. I moved the location of the object in PHCad, re-downloaded it, re-ran it, and sure enough, it again moved the origin so the output would be where the object was located in the PHCad workspace.

The take-away is this:

• PanelLocation will always use the origin set [by the control panel] at the laser.
• SoftLocation will always output the job relative to the workspace location of the object in PHCad.

So, I guess my friend, and the others, were right after all. BUT, I'll bet they didn't know they were!