It’s new product now, I’ll wait couple of month, will be on ebay for $10. I don’t think anyone pay that money for piece of machined aluminum.
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Wow. Let’s make one of these for ChiliPeppr and then update the Touch Plate widget to support it. I don’t think it would be that hard. I think the amount of aluminum that is used could be way less than that hunk. I do like the banana plug idea though, but an alligator clip could be fine too and may be more useful if you end up with different styles of touch plates in your arsenal.
Even you can do it with nice solid wood, just screw piece of copper on it, you’re done. Go buy something for nice barbeque with that $70. 
@JohnLauer is the ChiliPeppr touch probe widget only in mm or is there a way to change it to inches? When I toggle the units the touch probe widget stays in mm.
Mine does the same, I just make sure my gcode file has the g20 code at the beginning to go back to inches when it carves.
As promised here is the video and a text file that has the lines of gcode that you can copy and paste into universal gcode sender’s macro tab.
Here is the text file to go with the video.
Gcodes to set z zero.txt (322 Bytes)
I hope this helps simplify things.
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Charley,
Many thanks. That’s absolutely perfect - it’s folk like you who take a little time to share their experience and knowledge, who save hours of mucking around for dolts like me. Not sure which part of the planet you’re on, but if you ever get to West Oz, I’ll be happy to buy you a beer…
Your timing is perfect and I’ll be setting up a touch plate this afternoon, while I finish wiring in my new limit switches and home switches. It’ll mean I not need to perform surgery on the controller a second time.
My spindle motor dying was a major pain in the butt, however the downtime means I’ve been prompted to finish off the Limit/Homing switches and touch plate wiring instead of turning pieces of wood into sawdust.
Thanks again,
David.
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I am in the Great State of Texas in the good 'ol US of A. I’m glad that the video helped inspire you to step up your game a little. One recommendation. Before you perform this zeroing sequence for real, click on the macro button to start one of the moves and then manualy move the touch plate to touch the bit before it has a chance to reach zero. This will insure that your connections are correct and you don’t drive the bit through the plate and break something. If you touch the bit with the plate in your hand and it stops then your good to go. If it doesn’t stop then you have something set up wrong and you should have time to kill power to the steppers before they bottom out son something.
Also, the code provided only moves the bit 1/2 inch maximum during it’s search. If it does not find the touch plate within that 1/2 inch of travel it will stop automatically and USG will issue an alarm state and prevent any further commands. You will have to power down you Arduino and restart it to regain control. A pain in the rear but better safe than sorry.
Good luck my friend and happy milling,
Charley
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You’re good man Charley. We learned good stuff from you and we’re expecting more. Thank you.
Yeah, it’s only got mm for now. Feel free to fork it and add unit detection/toggling and I could publish the update.
Your to kind Alan.
My next upgrade project is to add the Dewalt DWP 611. The tracking number shows that it should arrive today. Already have the Dewalt. Can’t wait to get this upgrade done. If it goes well I will post the steps I use to install it. There is a fair amount of bits and pieces of info on the forum am trying to consolidate. I guess time will tell but I am very optimistic.
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I’m using DWP611 about a month now. It is work horse. Couple small problems I dealed with, but still smooth operation. They says it is loud, even my wife is louder than that. Enjoy.
Careful my friend, don’t want to get you millin’ privileges suspended!
Care to elaborate on the “small problems” you had to deal with?
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Is your x-carve out in the garage? Have you got a cot out there?
If your wife looks over your shoulder while you are on the forum, you may need it! 
I have two surveillance camera on stairs. When she start cumming down stairs to Basement, I start working with X-Carve. 
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SO, looking into this touch plate thing again.
I understand pretty clearly, the spindle end of the wiring, and I get the a5 pin and ground on the arduino.
Do I solder a pair of header pins to the gshield in the appropriate place that corresponds to the a5 and ground on the arduino? can I ground out at the spindle ground , or is that not the same?
My Piranha had the touch plate and plugged in with an audio jack on the control unit and was automated with prompts for operation. I think if i can figure this out I will set a female audio jack up and make a similar wiring setup.
If you look down into the controller enclosure, you can actually see and access the headers for A0-A5 on the Arduino itself. The gShield isn’t connected to/doesn’t use those six pins, so they thoughtfully left a small but usable hole to get to them.
The easiest place to tie into ground is on the 24V input to the gShield. You can also use the ground from the output side the power supply itself. I imagine the spindle circuit ground is also common to all of that, but I’d stick with the “normal” power supply ground.
I soldered a header pin to a wire which connects to my plate. That just pushes into the header socket. I then have an alligator clip that I connect between the ground of my z-homing switch and the tool.
I’m thinking of building a secondary wasteboard, and attaching a piece of aluminum to act as a manual touchplate. It would be easy enough to connect a watch battery and LED to the aluminum and run a clip to the bit, then just manually home it until the LED comes on. The last few moments of each one would have to be at .001" or so.
If I do something like this, can I adjust the settings in Easel to account for half of the bit’s width? Can you set an equation in the $ settings, or would I have to adjust the settings manually each time to achieve true 0,0,0?
I could not quite see what youwere talking about with regars to the hole and having it line up through the g shield so i soldered a pair of pins into the shield since there are corrosponding pins that plug into the arduino at those locations allowing me to pick up a 5v and gnd connections.
I entered @CharleyThomas’s g code into the macro tab and sent it on its way.
As soon as it hit the zero plate, I got a “java has stopped working message” and it locke things up.
Subsequent attempts even caused me to lose ugs’s connection to the arduino’s com port and I had to reboot to get it back.
I am not sure what i did but SUMTINGWONG!
I think I may go @RobertA_Rieke’s route and use a test light setup…