The Troubleshooting Guide, a new feature

Hey everyone, I’m proud to announce a new feature in Easel! We’re calling this the troubleshooting guide. Its goal is to help users diagnose any issues they might have during a job and guide them through fixing it.

We’ve all been there, where you go to cut an awesome coaster or beautiful sign but something went wrong and it didn’t turn out the way you wanted. There are lots of reasons why something can go wrong and often times a single cause can manifest it self in different ways. This can cause a lot of frustration when trying to diagnose the problem and fix it. While this doesn’t provide as comprehensive guidance as a phone call with our CS team would, it is meant to provide a first step.


When you finish a job, you get the familiar dialog box asking how the job went:

Clicking “something went wrong” will bring you to a list of things that could have gone wrong. For example, the Y-Axis potentiometer may not be turned up enough, causing the carve to be offset mid way through a job. Generally speaking, the first time this happens can be very frustrating simply because you don’t know why it happened. The troubleshooting guide is meant to bridge that gap and provide the missing information, getting you carving accurately as fast as possible.

Lets say you were having an offset issue. Clicking “Carving is offset” will display a short description of the symptom, and a list of things that can cause this issue. Each of these possible causes has a set of steps for diagnosing whether this cause applies to your machine, and the actions required to solve it.

If you can’t find whats happening, you can submit a bug report (we do read those!).


Good luck and happy carving!

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I just noticed the icon for “Machine component came loose” is awesome and hilarious. It reminds me of a factory churning out screws…

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great idea

That is super useful! I know it has already helped one user.

If you select “Machine Component came lose” does it tell you to put it back on?

Good idea, hopefully this will really help for those common first time user issues that come up.

I think it just says “Eh, it probably wasn’t important anyway” :wink:

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Love it!

Very nice :smile:

One thing I’d like to add to @EricDobroveanu post is that the list of Potential Causes and Troubleshooting steps is dynamic. By this I mean we will be adding to it and editing it over time as the machine evolves and as a community we get better at identifying potential causes and solutions.

The more contributions we get from the community the better we can make the experience for everyone. We do a lot of testing in our lab but often times the real world throws the machines into situations we didn’t account for in our testing. Our dream with this new tool is that we can work together as a community to make working with Easel, X-Carve, and Carvey the easiest to use 3D carving tools in the world.

With X-Carve many of the issues relate to the assembly of the machine. With Carvey since the machine comes assembled we expect the issues to be more focused on usage like the bits breaking (which will happen with normal use over time) or challenges machining materials we haven’t tested in our lab.

We hope you can help us make Easel a little better every day.

How about putting a link to the information in the help section of Easel for those of us who use Easel to generate the G-code but use an alternative (for various reasons such as no network connectivity in the shop) method for running the machine?

Thanks.

Scott

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