I’m doing a 2 stage carve and it will take till late in the night to complete. At the end of the roughing stage, when it goes back to the XY zero point to await bit change, can I shut off the machine and pick up where I left off in the morning and just leave the browser tab for the project open? In other words, do the detail pass in the morning?
When I’ve done this in the past, the only things I turn off are the spindle and the monitor. You must ensure that your PC never goes to “sleep,” and leave the X-Controller on. Works like a charm for me.
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Thanks for the reply Mike.
Ok, so no worries about the X-Controller getting too hot during the night then? How about the stepper motors? I have those set at full voltage so there’s no slop/movement during bit changes…
The steppers and controller operate at full power regardless of any motion (unless $1=254 or less, or IdleCurrentReduction is set to ON). As long as the steppers dont exceed 176degF case temperature they will be just fine, they are actually quite tolerant.
You should not expect much temp rise between motion/stationary.
Pausing Easel, power router off is my typical approach for minor interruptions. I do advice you to take note of the machine coordinates as it is possible that during the night the USB have a brief disconnect and loose sync. You wont be able to tell without knowing the coordinates.
I have homing switches installed so what I do for overnight pause is home prior to the 1st stage, complete it and power everything down. So for 2nd stage next day I re-home, and continue from that.
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The easiest thing to do is download the G code for the 2 passes and run them separately. I wouldn’t leave the chance your computer rebooting cause an issue in the middle of the night.
Locktite, how do I go about that?
in Easel click on “Machine” then “advanced settings” it will give you the option to download the gcode from there