So, I had a free pin on the arduino, and I'd hate to see it go to waste, so its going to become the sense pin for auto leveling.

I got a wire hooked up to ground, and the other wire hooked up to the free pin (D8). They both have aligator clips, so you clip one to the board, and one to the end mill, and then run the auto leveling routine.

It probes the entire board (with a width and height you specify) at intervals you decide (so for my board, its 100mm x 70mm, and I have it probe 10 in X axis, and 7 in the Y axis) and gets the Z offset compared to home. It puts all that into a table and becomes accessible during x/y movements. Every step of the xy axis in my gotoXY routine it says "Hey, im at a new position, lets check to see what my new Z height needs to be to get that route depth i want" so it does a bunch of math and corrects the Z position to give you that cutting depth you want.

Its a work in progress and I've gotten some nice test cuts, but Ive also found some bugs and need to decide how I want to actually have it implemented in code. right now the codes a mess, and very awkward. I have it implemented in my gotoXY routine, with a parameter asking if you want to make auto leveling corrections. I'm thinking I'll make a gotoXYAutoLevel routine that will do all this, and it will leave the gotoZ and gotoXY commands pure and free of this mess.

or should it be gotoXYZAutoLevel? That'd probably be easier. I dont know. I'm going to find out.

#hashtagssuck