I am making a bunch of glockenspiels for elementary school students. The base plates for these have a series (18) of 1/8" holes that need to be drilled in the same location on each of 36 baseplates in order to support each idiophone (the metal sounding tube) at the antinode of the resonant wavelength.
I am running the carving job over and over on identical blanks. The machine does this just fine, mostly. Usually, at the end of the carve, the spindle returns to it’s logical home, I load a new blank and repeat the carve.
But on about every third carve, the machine generates the tool path and positions the spindle for the first element, then the spindle shuts down.
When I restart the carve I am prompted to repeat the entire homing procedure. It’s not that this is hard to do, but it does take quite a bit of extra time to do it and it shouldn’t be necessary as I am already confirming the logical home before I start the carve.
Anyone have thoughts?
I have done multiple (6 in a row) jobs like you stated with no issues.
I would home once, then tell Easel to use “last home position”.
However in your scenario, sounds like something is getting reset…
Maybe the GRBL / Arduino?
Unfortunately I do not know how to fix it or what is causing it.
Thanks for thinking about it Jeremy.
More observations and careful record keeping indicate the following:
When it occurs, it always occurs after generating the tool path, but before the spindle moves from the home location to the first carving position.
If I confirm the logical home postion by re-zeroing the z-axis, the problem is less frequent…maybe one out of every 5 or 6 carve attempts, whereas if I tell it to re-use the previous home position, it happens once every 2 or 3 attempts.
However, the problem also frequently occurs the first time I attempt to carve a new file after having run the homing sequence, in fact, this morning, I was setting up my glockenspiel project carve after closing it down last night, and I had to go through the homing sequence 5 times before it actually started the carve, but then it did 9 consecutive multiples without a hitch.
One more piece of information.
I have just had three suspends in a row. followed by four successful carves. Possibly what is happening is that the tool path generator function is stopping prematurely.
At the end of the logical homing operation, I start the spindle from the terminal, confirm spindle operation, and click [start carving]
Tool path generation commences.
On a successful carve, the tool path generation progress bar completely fills the bubble, the bubble remains on screen for a second or two, and then disappears and the carve begins.
On a failed carve, the progress bar makes it almost to the end of the bubble, but halts with just a tiny bit of white space left, suggesting that the tool path generation did not finish. The progress bar vanishes, then the spindle shuts down and all dialog boxes close. When I then click [CARVE], I am prompted to repeat the homing sequence. Usually I only have to rehome the machine once, but ocassionally I have to repeat the homing sequence 2, 3, 4, or up to 5 times before the carve starts successfully.
I have checked the obvious things, power supply, USB cables etc, and since I am generall able to to recover quickly and return to work, it’s not that big a deal, but it is one of those silly things that detracts from perfect execution. Grrrr…
