Wired ones are $189.
Well, you have a cnc machine, you could make one.
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How would you make one ? I am suddenly very interested 
I’ve also seen them 3d printed.
Very cool , I may have to find a video or plans for the 3D printed version , I do have the touch sensor from the store, but I’m not sure how I would integrate that.
It’s basically the same thing. The probe is one side of the switch, then the other side is a broken ring going around the barrel of the probe housing. The center section completes the breaks in the ring, so when it gets moved, it breaks the circuit. They’re really easy to make, but kind of a pain to adjust. The reason the commercial ones have a ruby end is because they’re non-conductive, and super smooth, won’t scratch anything.
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May just be worth saving for one then , and then seeing if the forward supports it , or if I would have to change firmwares , I would think it would be no different than mesh leveling that marlin supports but I have no idea.
Yea, it’s just an endstop as far as marlin is concerned.
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Jamie made a 3D printable one, I have one, I can’t find the link though.
The BLtouch would also be a super accurate option, but it would take some fancy coding to get it to work outside of mesh leveling, since the probe needs to redeploy after each trigger.
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I use the bl touch on my ender 3 and I believe have mesh leveling set, it probes 9 places and redeploys after each one, is that what you referring to?
Yes. The workflow is built in for 3D printing, but if we went outside of Marlin it could get more difficult with the BLTouch, where a regular touch probe just acts as an endstop and only needs an offset.
I did recently buy a bltouch. If I have time next week maybe I’ll see what I can do with it.
I still have Mach4 and that larger CNC machine in my shop until the end of next week.
How do you like Mach4 can it be used with the lowrider?
It’s not bad. Not sure it’s worth the price of entry.
Mach4 runs on a computer, so you have to have a breakout board and drivers for all of the stepper motors. Plus you need a computer in the shop. For this setup I went with a LattePanda Alpha. I 3d printed a mount so I could bolt it to the back of a 10" touchscreen.
The machine I’m using it on has an Ethernet Smooth Stepper for the break out board and a Gecko G540 to drive the stepper motors.
I’m slowly gather parts to replace the Gecko with independent drivers.
It’ll run just about anything you want to hook up to it.
If I had to do it over I think I’d try to get LinuxCNC working before investing in Mach4. The CNC had an ancient windows XP box running Mach3 on it previously, so that’s partly why I switched to Mach4. Most of the settings transferred over to the new one.
Would I choose a computer based system (mach4 or linuxCNC) over Marlin or GRBL for my MPCNC or a LowRider? Probably not. The more stand-alone based systems really work great for what we’re asking them to do and with them driven by CNC.js you have great remote capabilities.
I do like that I have seafile running on the Mach4 system so any Gcode I create on the computer in the house is auto-synced to the Mach4 computer, but I’m sure there’s other ways of doing something similar. I could probably even figure out how to do it with the Raspberry Pi’s running CNC.js that I’ve been using to control my MPCNC and my laser engraver.
Honestly, I went with the Mach4 setup because I have future plans for CNC stuff (cough… plasma… cough) and I should be able to use the monitor/alpha combo on multiple machines by just hooking the ethernet port to the ESS on them. I wouldn’t be able to run multiple machines at the same time, but I probably shouldn’t/wouldn’t want to do that anyways.
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It would be nice if we had a place to see all the user mods… Like a catalogue. 
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There are thousands and thousands on thingiverse, and other places. It is really pretty hard to wrangle them all into a list.
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I looked at Thingiverse and there are tons of probes, just couldn’t find Jamie’s.
Here’s mine: Touch Probe on MPCNC
Although I should mention, if probing only in Z, you could build one much simpler. This touch probe is for probing in X and Y too.
I should also mention, printed springs in PLA are terrible. Even if it works for a little while, with creep it will quit working before long.
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This Old Tony’s video inspired me too… Did some digging and came across this old MPCNC thread from 2017…
Looks as though he leveraged the bilinear bed mapping where you specify the RLFB boundaries of the piece to map, along with the grid size when you call G29…
Another approach would be to script Gcode G30 calls over this area to create a surface height mapping file in python that you could then load into the G-Code-Ripper to apply your 2D carving over the mapped curved surface.
I’ve started experimenting with both approaches, by simply mounting an endstop microswitch attachment to my mount… not fancy, but as long as it doesn’t move, then I believe that post-mapping, I will only need to re-zero with my vbit to the exact same point and that should do it…
MPCNC Community project to get this new capability up and running?
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