Z axis control durring alignment probing

[pathare]

I like how when doing a bottom side alignment, the probe goes into the hole, but it would be nice to be able to back it out a couple steps to see an air gap all the way around the probe. I think it would make it easier to center the probe in the hole this way.

right now I raise and lower the probe and try and see a deflection as it enters the hole to know its off center. its relatively time consuming and still takes two or three realignments to attempt to get a decent bottom side alignment for the board.

[troy]

Thanks for the suggestion @pathare. I think we could do this by adding some height control buttons under "Advanced...". Would that meet your needs?

One point I want to clarify, I assume you see a gap now and want to raise a bit to make the gap easier to see, right?

[pathare]

that would be great, and no my probe sits down into the via or fiducial I'm using to align the board. I get no noticeable gap between the hole and the probe, that's why I raise and lower the probe moving it till the probe comes straight down into the hole without touching the edges.

[Marten]

I like to use the pre-installed via’s on the Voltera boards for aligning.

Watching how the probing needle falls INTO the hole during lowering tells me more about the adjustments I have to make than only hovering over them (because you always look at an angle, finding the center can be difficult).

So I lower and raise the probe multiple times to watch the needle movement from different directions and make adjustments accordingly.

I also found that the full raising and lowering takes significant time and I would like to have a button in the probing process to raise and lower it only to the hovering level.