Long Projects

Hello everyone, I’m still new to this and so here’s my first post. My longest project yet has been 4 hours. Recently I have been itching to create bigger sizes. I recently created 3 as a project to want to start. these projects are 16hours or less. I don’t understand how to achieve this. my question is, is there a way to stop or pause the project the project for tomorrow. my 1000 xcarve sits at the shop. By the end of the day I go home with my lap top. anyone have any ideas? has anyone had long hour projects? if so, how do you tackle this challenge? I’ve tried using other bits to see if project hours shorten but it changes the style of work and the time doesn’t decrease.

  • Disable any USB sleep function or power management on your host computer
  • Run carve, hit “Pause” and leave everything on and running except the router
  • Tomorrow restart router and press “Resume”

For long carves always have a fixed reference point like homing switches or similar in case something needs to be reset.

Easiest - leave everything connected (as @HaldorLonningdal described)
My preferred way - edit the gcode to resume where you stop it.
Easely way - tile the job in Easel. Cover up sections to separate the job into two or more operations.

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You can install homing switches, this is probably your best bet, but it takes some doing obviously.

If it’s not critical, you can power off the machine and power it on again later without touching it. There is a real chance your cutting head will slightly move upon powering up. That’s why I said: do this only between operations that aren’t critically positioned relative to each other. For example, vcarve a sign - power down - power up - do the profile cut. Your vcarve might me half a millimeter off centre relative to the cutout because of this, but who’ll notice that…
Even so, there’s an important order of things you need to do for this to succeed.

  • Make the gcode in 2 separate files. There are means to resume within a gcode file, but that’s another story.
  • After the first part, before powering down, send your cutter back to home!
  • When powering up, it will take its current coordinate as zero. That’s why you must home before powering off.
  • Start the second cut.

If I left something out or misspoke, someone hopefully will chime in.

Good luck!

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