Agreed, although it does seem a mishmash of units is the nature of the beast - 8x4ft “full sheets” is the last place I still begrudgingly use imperial. Well, and staging. Only maniacs have metric deck.
My country on the other hand, is a mixmatch all over the place. Fuel in liters, distances in miles… so really we need fuel economy in miles per liter Anyway.
mm/s vs mm/min is almost more annoying to me in that respect - the right units on the wrong scale!
In any case, I happen to know this forum software quite well. On a different board I wrote a plugin that allowed people to hover over common acronyms and get the expansion. Automatic and system wide. I figure it’s possible to do the same for units. Either show all the options alongside each other, or a better approach might be to allow users to choose what units they prefer to work in, and those are the units they see forum wide.
I can probably bash that together pretty quickly, if that would be something that might be useful? Perhaps most of you are way better at converting in your head than me, and don’t really see the use!
Units suck. Some more than others.
I could write a plugin for the forum that would help with unit conversions - automatic detection of common units and abbreviations (within reason) and revealing conversions when you hover over the text (feel free to shoot better UX ideas at me!). That is reasonably trivial to implement, if that is something we would like.
Similar to the automatic timezone conversion plugin if any of you have encountered that before.
A “stretch goal” could be allowing us to each select what units we work in mentally on our profile and using those units for display by default across the forum, but I don’t know how much extra work that would be off the top of my head, or how many people might prefer that.
I wonder if someone could write a forum plugin that could detect when a post contains a measurement in imperial and add the metric conversion automatically….
Converting distance is easy enough since 1 inch = 25.4 mm, round to 25 and 4 inches is about 100 mm. But when you get into fractions of an inch, I get lost. Since we typically deal with inches as fractions down to 1/16 or 1/32. Sure, I know 1/8 is 0.125 but I don’t know, I don’t normally think like that.
By the time I’m trying to convert inches per minute to mm per second, I’m lost without plugging it into a converter.
I think this is a solution looking for a problem. Automatic conversions usually suck. Sometimes 100mm is close enough to 4". Usually, 6mm is not close enough to 1/4".
I use mm all the time and my preferred speed reference is mm/s. But gcode is mm/min and all the tools and materials I can buy in North America are in inches or fractions.
I’m sorry if you grew up un Europe and only have metric. It is a little bit like how Americans want everything in English. We didn’t grow up with much metric and our construction (builder) industry is imperial. Our engineering is almost entirely metric though. Except civil engineering.
Can’t people read (a converted) 101.6mm and think 100mm if they want to? And be shot if they think of 1/4" as 6mm.
I only commented about this on the other thread thinking that I was spending half the time trying to help someone just doing unit conversions between seconds and minutes along with from inches to millimeters (and back) – not to get a reference in my head, but to get everything everyone was saying into precisely comparable units. Not that it took long, but it did add a bunch of time to the point where I almost didn’t bother… and I figure others didn’t bother either.
Converting to close enough values is super quick and good enough, until someone is chasing zeroes and is looking for 0.017".
I am fortunate enough to have been working in the construction industry when metric conversion happened in Australia, so I grew up with imperial dimensions (now known as 'merican measure) and had to hard convert my brain to full metric in the early '70’s.
I would say usually 6mm is close enough to describe 1/4", but not to measure it!
I disagree, putting aside bit sizes - thats just how they come - I just can’t parse imperial measurements for feed rates, accuracy.
So IF I want to help, or contribute at least, I have to convert them every time. Think of the posts that are in a different language. We can all use google translate, but how many go to the trouble? Anything that makes it easier to help is worth considering.
Meters for distance, except when driving and measuring people
Sheet goods and steel pipe are inches, everything else is metric.
I know there are other sillier situations I can’t think of at the moment.
You’d think that’d make me good at converting, but no. (this is partly that I’m just not good at that sort of thing) I just work in a weird mix of units – leaving fractional imperial as imperial and converting feeds to metric. Most cursedly, I have my chipload unit in EstlCAM as inches with every other unit metric
I appreciate that an automatic solution will be inherently non perfect but I kinda see it as an extension of automatic language translation, which works mostly good enough?
Suggest setting Estlcam up with mm/sec for estlcam but mm/min for the controller.
Is there a reason for that? Why not just use mm/min for both? I notice most people on the forum tend to use mm/min so there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to using mm/sec in estlcam.
Yeah, you get smaller numbers to work with…but I actually have a tab open to convert between mm/sec and mm/min since while it’s simple math…it’s also the kind of math I mess up on because it’s so simple
I’ve been thinking about reconfiguring to use mm/min just so it’s less converting. especially since I’m dealing with gcode directly playing with my zenxy and eggbots. And @jamiek’s tools are all mm/min as well (big thanks for those - they’re super helpful!)
So the suggestion of mm/sec in the setup seems like it may cause more confusion unless there’s a benefit I’m just not seeing.
I used to use mm/min because that’s what was predominately used in the forum when I joined, but had more recently switched to mm/s because it just makes more sense to me.
Dealing with 3D printers, I learned to gauge how fast 25/50/100/200 mm/s is pretty easily.
3000 mm/min doesn’t mean anything to me unless I convert it in my head to mm/s, so I just started using it directly instead so there’s less chance of me making errors when configuring things.
But, I rarely edit gcode directly.
I think, in the end, you should use whatever you are most comfortable with, and will help you make less mistakes.
As for the main discussion… I’ve never really found unit conversions in the forum to be that much of an issue. Most people use mm/s or mm/min, so the conversion is not that hard.
I don’t really remember seeing people here use in/sec that much. Not sure why, because other forums/facebook/whatever, it seems to be predominately what most other CNC groups speak in…
@vicious1 says this all the time. Its so much easier to see mm/s where mm/m mean nothing. Any time I am helping someone and they are talking in mm/m I have to convert it to get any real idea of what they are looking for
I can do mm/min much easier in my head because I automatically convert it into meters. 3000mm/min are 3m… 15mm/s… like, what? What‘s that in m per minute…
in/sec or mm/sec I can reasonably estimate in my head that distance and time.
in / min or mm / min… A minute is too long for me to be able to able to get an understanding of that timeframe and speed without just doing it and forming a bit of a lookup table in my mind over time… like we do with MPH.
the “per second” measurements, to me, are just easier to grasp and understand as a beginner.
You only ever deal with one parameter. You can use whatever you choose. The controller needs mm/min.
I am in the same boat as Mike, I have a solid grasp of what a second is more so than a minute, and honestly I learned small units in MM. So mm/sec is what I use. I learned that because 3D printers use mm/sec, why buck the norm?
Remeber nothing is forced, It is set up so you can use any units you want in CAM.
There is a thread recently about chasing zeros all done in Decimal inches, I honestly. I have zero grasp of what a Thousandth of an inch is. So I stayed out of that thread because I have to open a unit converter and the calculatior to have any idea of what sort of numbers they were chasing.
Anyway.
I’m not the most clear when I’m not concentrating really hard on not being rambling and wordy, though
And that’s pretty great.