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First off, I love what you all have done with Easel. It is some great software.
One issue that I keep running into is that on the carve interface, the Z and Y jog arrows are very close together and since they both have up and down wedges, it is super easy to hit mix them up if you are not paying close attention to it.
Would it be possible to move the Z axis jog arrows to below the box for entering travel distance?. I know personally, I have hit Z instead of Y at least 4 times today. Thankfully I was able to shut things down before my Z axis tried to move 10 inches into my work piece. I think this change would have eliminated all of those errors, and would make for a much more intuitive interface.
Was just thinking about this on my way home today, and even just changing the symbols on the Z axis from up and down arrows to plus and minus signs would be a great improvement,
What do you guys think of adding a bit of margin between the Z-axis and Y-axis buttons, as a quick-fix?
In the future we could add some z-axis protection to prevent you from jogging more than a predetermined dangerous amount in the Z (like 4inches or more).
We could also cap the amount we will jog in the Z direction. No matter where the button is or what color it is, you could accidentally click it. It doesn’t seem like jogging 10" in the Z would ever be a good idea. Easel could just throttle that down to an inch or so.
I think limiting the Z distance like you and @JeffTalbot both mentioned would be really helpful. Are you guys talking about adding a hard limit onto the Z, where say you have 10 inches selected and accidentally hit Z, it would only move 1? That would be great.
What would you think about completely disabling Z if anything more than a predetermined amount was entered in the step interval box?
I think this is a huge improvement! At least for me, it’s typically a simple ‘meant to hit Y and accidentally got the Z’.
I have no idea how much effort this would be, but would it be possible to have unique step intervals for each axis? I’m envisioning a box you could check that would sync them all if desired (similar to the lock button when modifying a shape’s size) and you could uncheck if you want to use different step intervals. No idea if anyone else would see value in that, but I would love to see it.
I’ve been trying to stick with using keyboard arrows instead left/right for X, up/down for Y, and shift+up/down for Z, so the buttons themselves haven’t been too much of an issue for me.The problem I end up with is that the tab order for items on the screen to get to the step interval box is about 9-10 presses of TAB to get there. And since I’m using a wireless keyboard and a MS Surface 2 on a wall shelf out of sight when i’m jogging it around it’s not the easiest to move/alter the interval, move back, etc(pic for example). Could there be a +/- shortcut to increase/decrease the interval by factors of 10, like 0.1, .01, etc(or some other unit)?
I think adding a separate step interval for the Z-Axis and a separate one for the X&Y would be helpful as I could see leaving the z jog relatively consistent and changing the X&Y more often.
Also as a more general note on controlling the machine jog it would be great to be able to move the machine with just launching the Easel website and not having to hit carve as i find wanting to move the machine and then go back and make an edit. Perhaps these controls should be replicate in the machine drop-down or make it so i can have one tab open for machine control and one for easel at the same time.
I love the idea of a cap on the Z movement. Having it be user-controlled (like the safety height) would be even better, since I personally would like a limit of .5 or even .25 inches. Having something like that would have saved the bit that I tried driving 20 inches into the wasteboard yesterday…
As I said back then making a limit optional would be a better option than forcing a maximum.
Other option than moving would be to make an overlay that disables the z-axis buttons when you have clicked the X, Y buttons so you have to click them twice(and an audible notification when unlocked) as I mostly have problems when I’m looking at the machine and not the mouse and the mouse starts slipping down towards the z buttons. Just moving it down may still have this problem due to mouse dpi or tracking speed for some but not for others.
