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On occasion… too many of them… I have entered a command in Easel’s “Machine Controls” panel, only to immediately regret it and try to stop the machine by any means possible. For example, this evening I told it to come forward 16 inches on the Y axis. That is, I thought I did, until it started going down and I realized I’d hit the Z axis down arrow by mistake. Closing the “Carve” window does nothing, and there’s nothing else I see that remotely resembles “Cancel” or more appropriately, “ABORT!” I sat here in misery watching it go down to the board, where my 1/32" bit bent sideways and snapped off, and then the machinery groaned and whined for what seemed an interminable amount of time before it stopped trying to go down.
Pull power to the power supply, wire an estop, theoretically I think if you unplug the USB on the old arduino/gshield setup it will turn off the arduino which would stop motor control from GRBL, the Xcontroller has a built-in estop.
Thanks, gents. I was really hoping for something software-ish. My controller sits behind the computer under a minimal framework of wood and plastic sheeting to protect it from dust. The on-off switch is nestled up in the midst of those nine small wires that attach to the controller on the same side. Getting to that switch in time to prevent disaster would be quite a feat, indeed. Unplugging the power source would take almost that long.
Additionally, turning off the power doesn’t immediately stop the movement. In a test on the Y axis it continued on for six inches after I switched it off. However, unplugging the USB hadn’t occurred to me, and it does cause an immediate stop, plus it’s right here at the computer where I am. Thanks, Justin. I’m not familiar with an estop (yet), but will look into it. I’m planning an upgrade soon which ought to help with this.
I really thought there would be a built-in means to immediately stop the movement and cancel all instructions, either software or hardware. It is such an obvious need, not having it seems a bit like having a car without brakes.
Thanks, Larry. It sounds like that thread is discussing working with g-code sender. I’m in Easel for this. Not running a carve, just manually moving the router in real time. For example, a carve finished and I used the “Machine Control” section to raise it a couple of inches and scoot it back about 20 inches, and now I want to move it back forward again to set up for the next carve. So I use the “Machine Control” section and tell it to move back forward again, except this time instead of the down arrow for Y, which is “forward”, I mistakenly hit the down arrow for Z, which is literally “down”. There’s nothing there but these six arrows; two for X, two for Y and two for Z. A “Stop Immediately” button would be a nifty addition.
