One thing that has been irritating me since looking at Delta printers is the way the vertical physical axes are referred to as XY and Z.

This may sound like an irrational whinge, but the problem with calling the vertical machine axes XYZ is it make it very easy to confuse them with the Cartesian XYZ axes used in the G-Codes, for instance if I'm talking about an X axis problem am I talking about one of the physical vertical axes or the virtual Cartesian axis?

With a Cartesian machine of course the XYZ Cartesian axes are the XYZ machine axes so there is little scope for confusion, and in the firmware there will be a fairly simple relationship between the Gcode and the axis commands, maybe complicated by compensation algorithms, but still there is a direct understandable relationship

On an industrial CNC controller, these axes would be called something other than XYZ in order to avoid confusion between the physical axes and virtual Cartesian axes. typically I would expect them to be identified as K1,K2,K3 or W1,W2,W3 or Z1,Z2,Z3 or even IJK or UVW... these last two would also have potential for confusion, but if your working with an application that doesn't bother with circular interpolation or incremental axes then they are considered free to use, however XYZ and ABC are generally reserved for axes with a direct relationship to their Cartesian and polar counterparts.

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RepRapPro Mendel 3 Tricolour
RepRapPro Fisher
-Carbon Arms
-Easy adjust Carriage+effector
-axis stiffness mods
HE3D -600 delta
-Duet 0.8.5
-PanelDue
-DC42 Height probe
-RobotDigg metal components
Simplyfy3D
RS Design Spark CAD

I agree, it is confusing. I think the towers are called XYZ becauae that's how the stepper motor connectors are labelled on 3D printer controller boards..

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Would it cause a lot of issues if I were to propose that the IJK or UVW notation is adopted for the physical axes?

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RepRapPro Mendel 3 Tricolour
RepRapPro Fisher
-Carbon Arms
-Easy adjust Carriage+effector
-axis stiffness mods
HE3D -600 delta
-Duet 0.8.5
-PanelDue
-DC42 Height probe
-RobotDigg metal components
Simplyfy3D
RS Design Spark CAD

Just be grateful that they didn't use Z1, Z2 and Z3!
While it would have made more sense, it could be a bit more confusing during assembly.

Note that Smoothieware have adopted the designation Alpha (X), Beta (Y), Gamma (Z), so some homogeneity between softwares could be interesting.
I agree that it could be confusing, especially for the Z axis/Zcolumn, but at least, it makes wiring clear.
Just Complete the board serigraphy ? (which is already quite crowded).

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/23/2015 03:06PM by PRZ.

Quote
GRAYWOLF
Just be grateful that they didn't use Z1, Z2 and Z3!
While it would have made more sense, it could be a bit more confusing during assembly.

Z1,Z2,Z3 are bad but for a different reason, and that is it makes it hard to differentiate between Znn and Z1nn in GCode parsing, as I recall the last time I saw axes named with a letter/number combination, the letters were never used in GCode and the axis was always controlled indirectly via firmware, dual character designations that do get used in Gcode tend to be Letter/Letter designation, for example IS, XS etc


Alpha, Beta Gamma have a minor issue, and that is when you want to use the axis names in Gcode, because we are currently using XYZ for the axis names its not possible to program an axis specific move without using a control flag, if UVW was adopted then the Gcode parser can be set up to understand that X refers to the virtual Cartesian axis and U is the tower

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RepRapPro Mendel 3 Tricolour
RepRapPro Fisher
-Carbon Arms
-Easy adjust Carriage+effector
-axis stiffness mods
HE3D -600 delta
-Duet 0.8.5
-PanelDue
-DC42 Height probe
-RobotDigg metal components
Simplyfy3D
RS Design Spark CAD

Hi,
In my APritner firmware which is now available for Fisher the tower axes are called ABC, and you can also change the names in the configuration editor easily (need to do it both in the Stepper sections and the Coordinate Transformation section).

ABC is a poor choice, there are people out there playing with 4 and 5 axis printers, and they will be using ABC.

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RepRapPro Mendel 3 Tricolour
RepRapPro Fisher
-Carbon Arms
-Easy adjust Carriage+effector
-axis stiffness mods
HE3D -600 delta
-Duet 0.8.5
-PanelDue
-DC42 Height probe
-RobotDigg metal components
Simplyfy3D
RS Design Spark CAD