[feature request] Time remaining shown

Hi Guys, I’m Juan from Colombia,

Which are your opinions about the Easel bar that shows the status of the percentage remaining of the job?

What if it’s not only the percentage shown but also the time?

What do you think about it?

Thanks!

Hi Juan, great to hear from you!

Do you think it would be more / equally useful to see the time for the job before starting the job? Like somewhere while you are designing so that you have the chance to change your design to reduce the time?

Are you most concerned with time remaining or knowing the total time a job will take before starting the job?

Seeing a time estimate before I start the cut would be very nice, then I could do things like change the overlap and see what the time cost will be.

Always sticking my nose into things as my wife would say…My vote would be both. The Carvewright has this feature in their proprietory software and I must say I use on every single project. It is great for having an estimated number before the job begins for obvious planning and execution purposes. And much like the anticipation of waiting for the X Carve to ship it makes the wait more entertaining to see how much time is left. I can keep an eye on the job in progress, while planning and doing sidebar tasks maximizing my productivity. Come to think of it, maybe a countdown clock to shipping of the X Carve might be fun both in your office and on the website… ?

1 Like

I’m stressed out enough as it is thanks! :wink:

I think having it hang out in the interface, refreshing while you are making the design is the way to go with this. One concern I have with having it in the progress bar is that if our estimate is off (which it invariably will be because of data transfer rates/buffering affects on the velocity of the machine, acceleration differences, etc), it might say “10 seconds left” but it is actually a minute, or something. We could always do the “windows progress bar” thing and update our estimate from the elapsed time and progress, but then the number will jump around (like a windows progress bar :grimacing:)

I think your right, I will go steal my wife’s cake timer!

Hi Paul thanks for your answer!

I think both would be great so I could know how much time I have to use in another activity while the Shapeoko is working!

Hello everybody,
i think that the way to address the issue should be simpler, let’s say keep the percentage of work done as it is.
and the (remaining time/total time) as a timer in intervals of minutes instead of seconds

that way it’s going to show less actual error and it’s going to be more like it really is, an approximation.

now for the jumping number issue, the solution it could be to pre calculate the total time and just run a timer with that value, reducing it’s value until it reaches 0.

it’s not by any means perfect (no feedback from the actual process) but it could be a handy reference wish the user could modify by a factor say (0.9 if the cnc is going too fast or 1.1 if it’s taking more time) so the results could be more real and the approximation should be easier to implement this way

The estimate can be just that… an estimate. I -=PERSONALLY=- don’t have much issue with the time jumping around. Eventually I’ll figure out if it says something like 20 minutes, but I know I’m doing a lot of non-straight line work, that it’s going to be more than that. With the CAM app I’m using now, Autodesk Fusion 360, I found that once I updated it to the actual feed rates I’m using (generally between 250 and 600) rather than limited down by the machine, I started to get MUCH more accurate runtime estimation. Some operations I can run faster than others, based on my DOC, so something like a facing operation I can run at 600, but a 1/8" DOC through a curve I have to ramp down to something like 250… or I miss steps.

The biggest thing for me would be, as @AllenMassey pointed out, allowing one to do settings changes and see what the “cost” was time wise… so I’d know if I modified a value and suddenly went from a 3 hour job to a 17 hour job, that’s probably not what I’d intended. :smile:

Yeah this is definitely the best use of even a rough estimate. Do you think it would be useful to see this estimate even if a “time remaining” wasn’t actually shown in the progress bar?

I personally would prefer to JUST see the numbers. A progress bar showing percent completed doesn’t really mean all much to me. I like to see total estimated, elapsed time, and remaining time. Even if all of those numbers were being updated (aka Windows copy dialog wildly jumping about) during the job run, that is perfectly acceptable. I think most folks would be quite forgiving of an estimate as long as it tried to get reasonably close and updated that estimate as time elapsed. Plus this seems like it could be useful for end user statistics for job runs. Not sure what sort of data y’all collect now, but taking how jobs are created (SVG import vs all CAD done in app), what jobs are started, how many jobs are killed before completion, how many revisions to a model are done before it’s run to completion, how many times are models run (one off vs production runs) etc etc etc.

I vote yes, and no need for time remaining. Knowing how your paths effect estimated time of job is what matters.

Showing a time estimate before starting the project like when generating tool paths as well as time elapsed/remaining during the cut would be a great feature. It is something I try to estimate before if just cutting out a simple shape but when hogging out large areas with multiple passes, this becomes difficult. Please work on this!

We added this feature today in Easel. Check it out and please give feedback.

This is so great! Thanks for improve it!