Check or modify steps per mm

Before carving, it is a good idea to check that the distances on your screen’s commands will actually correspond with the same distances that the machine will make. If not, then no worries: then can be easily modified.

Let’s check them first: Click on the button with the four arrows in the top left (next to the green “carve…” button) and it will open a jog menu:

If you don’t have that button with the four corners, then it’s also possible to jog the machine by just clicking on the green “carve…” button itself:

In that jog menu, change the interval from 1mm to 10mm:

And click on the arrows of the axis and measure the distances that they actually travel.

Did they travel 10mm? Then you’re fine! Nothing to do anymore 🙂

Did they travel more or less then 10mm? Then you need to follow these steps:

Go to the menu “Machine”:

And in the menu that appears, click “advanced”:

Then, click “machine inspector”

This opens a window – where cryptic values are printed – scroll down in the list, and check the value that is there for $100, $101 and $102. These are respectively the values for the X, the Y and the Z axis.

Enter the value of the axis that wasn’t moving the requested 10mm distance (so value next to $100 for X, value next to $101 for Y and value next to $102 for Z):

Steps per mm calculator

And then, go back to this screen:

And in the text field you enter the new calculated value: for instance:

And press enter. An “ok” should be printed in the console output.

Do this for the axis that is required. So $100 is for X, $101 is for Y and $102 is for Z.

Then, I suggest that you re-do this step to check the distances now (please note: the first time that you do a jogging movement with new $100, $101 or $102 values, the controller may actually use a really weird distance movement, so ignore the first movement and then jog again)

If you still have to do the homing step from the “machine setup” because the steps per mm were not set correctly when doing the machine setup previously, then you can now re-do homing in machine setup.