Custom Origin Position (i.e. Center of Work Piece)

I’ve found a few old threads asking for the same thing, and even a member of the dev team mentioning that “this is a problem” (https://discuss.inventables.com/t/set-home-position-to-center-of-artwork/14455/8).

Any chance of this ever coming to light?

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You can carve on the X-Carve using the 0,0 point has the center of your part. See below.

@cg49me https://youtu.be/vgjZk3YcxaM
Here is a video that shows what can be done

Easel Home Position (aka work zero / material zero) can be anywhere within the reachable space of your machine.
Easel Home Position will always be at design X/Y zero shown to the left in Easel.

Your Home Position need to match the design, be it in center or bottom left or any other carveable point.
In other words, the zero point need to match the left design window.

Thanks for all the replies!

Zach_Kaplan, yes, that’s the well-known work-around, but ideally a “work-around” wouldn’t be required - hence the feature request.

Nice shameless plug, PhillipLunsford. :stuck_out_tongue:

My videos have all been about answering questions of primarily new XCarve owners. Hopefully it helped you as well

Sorry @PhillipLunsford, didn’t mean to offend. I’ve been watching several of your vids actually - great resources, thanks for putting them together!

None taken. Just trying to help

Hi to the Easel programming team.

Jeff Kaplan, is this a feature that is on the “to do” list?

I have seen the workaround, and watched the Phillip Lunsford video (thanks, Phillip!) but this workaround is klunky and the part ‘anchored’ to the 0.0 in the lower left corner of the grid loses any semblance of intuitive “correctness” in both Easel panes.

There are many objects where a center point (or a center line) is the defining point (or line) of operations. Think of clocks as a good example where you want to work from a center point, and think of a guitar peghead as a good example where you need to know where the center point is, and the X, Y axes going through that center point.

I realize that a great many Easel projects are objects cut completely out of a board. In those cases, the scrap around the object provides a margin of error - each part comes out perfect, even if each carve board is mounted in a slightly different position. However, if you want to carve some detail on an existing object, you have to know EXACTLY where to place the object on the sacrificial board - there is no room for error. Because there is no room for error, I would want to be able to jog the bit to a center point on the object, so that I know it is positioned correctly.

From a programming standpoint, it makes sense to me that you do not want to work in negative numbers for coordinates, so maybe think of this as an “alignment” feature: the operator jogs to a center point and hits a new ‘align’ button, and that creates the X, Y offset from whatever is the furthest lower left (0,0) in the drawing. That offset would then automatically modify all the carving code/G-code. The CAD pane would show correctly, the 3D carving pane and simulation would show correctly, and most of all, the part being partially carved or detailed would be aligned properly and would come out right.

Thanks for your consideration.

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Make sure to “like” all other posts you can find requesting this feature. It will “up-vote” the request to the dev team.

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It seems like this feature is in now, right? You can now have 0 X and 0 Y right in the middle of the work piece. No more oddball “lower left corner” stuff now right?

Yes here’s the setup for 2.5D workspace.

And Not quiteyet for the 3d workspace: