Is it possible to pause during a carve then jog the machine to move the z axis so I can remove the dust shoe and the resume the carve using easel?
When you hit the pause button on the x controller, the carve will stop and the router will rise up out of the way high enough for you to remove it.
Yours must work different then mine when i hit the pause button it stops right where it is.
The pause on the controller works differently than pause on the easel UI.
My pause on the Xcontroller will lift the Z up considrably.
Pause on the Easel UI will only stop it in place.
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Got it. I do not have the xcontoller so that is the difference.
Just to clarify, there are two different pause methods.
One is a software pause where Easel/UGS/PicSender stops sending commands. There are probably still commands that GRBL has buffered and those commands will execute until the buffer is depleted but no new commands will be sent. It is not an immediate pause. (Thanks to @LarryM for providing clarification that I didn’t mention).
The second method is a GRBL based feed hold. As Steve stated, the Inventables fork of GRBL treats a feed hold as a “door open” which triggers other safety features such as turning off the relay outputs and moving the spindle to the park position (machine zero near the limit switch). The non-Inventables version of GRBL does not have these options enabled by default and you’d need to enable them and then recompile or load the Inventables fork. Feed hold is a GRBL feature and should be supported on any controllers.
It should be noted that these programs may or may not stop the carve immediately. Most of the sender programs that I have used do not use feed hold/cycle start, but just stop filling the grbl input buffer. grbl will continue to execute until the input buffer is empty with possible loss of position and/or state.
If you use the feed hold/cycle start hardware switches that is an immediate stop without loss of position or data. Also the grbl immediate software commands are an immediate halt without loss of position or data.
Either method for pausing the carve (switches or feed hold) may or may not have the parking code active based on a config.h setting.
The X-Controller has buttons for these functions.
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Yes that is a critical part that I didn’t mention. I’ve edited my post to reflect that.
My Z axis doesn’t go up when I pause the machine in the x controller. What are the settings that need to be changed in order to do so?
Do you have homing switches and homing enabled? I haven’t dug too much into the GRBL code but I’d assume it cant do parking without homing.
Have you loaded a non-Inventables version of GRBL?
It uses machine coordinates, so I wouldn’t recommend without homing.
I only have done the Inventables version of GRBL and my homing is not enabled because I was having problems with my switches from day one so I disabled them.
I had a typo. I meant it can’t do it without homing. Fixed my post. Also, parking is a GRBL thing so if it’s enabled, it just does it, no user option.
That’s probably why it doesn’t move. I’ll take a look at the GRBL code and see because now I’m curious.
I don’t know much at all when it comes to GBRL and I thought that was like a feature that had to be added to Easel or something. So when I saw that it does it, I was curious about changing any settings to make it functional. Thanks for your help Justin. I guess I should work on my homing issues before anything. Thanks again!