Using a laptop? One gotcha

Tip. If using a laptop on battery power to control your X-Carve go through power settings and ensure it cannot go to sleep.

My Mac book did yesterday while carving. Got 73% through the job and it just stopped moving but spindle kept spinning. Cause? Mac book had gone to sleep.

I’m guessing there isn’t enough activity to prevent a sleep as it’s running from a Web app in a browser. Maybe something could be added to Easel Local to prevent this?

Cheers

Ian

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Yup. I learned the same lesson, luckily on just a little test piece.

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thanks for the tip. learned this the hard way myself, was using a CNC Shark in highschool, when the computer we had went to sleep, instead of stopping, the machine just continued cutting in whatever direction it was going! glad i caught it in time… that machine was haunted

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@IanWatkins, We use a lot of automated scripts at work, and if you do not interact with the computer, it doesn’t matter what the programs running are doing, it will sleep. Moving the mouse, or pressing a key are usually the only things that will reset the sleep counter. Changing the sleep settings is a good plan, but running from battery would not be my choice if there was any way around it. Good tip, and I am sure it will save someone a lot of grief. Thanks for sharing.

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On my MacBook Pro I have the following “Energy Saver” settings to prevent it from going to sleep when left open. When I want it to sleep, I just close the laptop.

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Happened to me before I changed my power settings on the MB Air - but I was able to continue on the project. Easel showed as running even though the machine had paused, so I hit “pause” then “resume” (or whatever it says) in quick succession and it resumed just fine for me.

Wish I saw this before I had to finds this out the hard way! Not the end of the world just kind of sucks.

I use a little tool on the mac called Caffine that sits in the menu bar, and has a little switch you can trigger to keep the mac from sleeping, and turn it off when done.

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I use Caffeine too https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/caffeine/id411246225?mt=12

Good tip

My recently installed win 10 laptop went to sleep at about 40% through a job yesterday. Lesson learned :smile:

I bought a mouse jiggler USB from Tiger Direct that does the same thing as Caffeine, but in the windows world. works well…

Not for this, but I wrote a windows app that jiggles the mouse every n minutes by 1 pixel and back. Stupid things like that can save you from computers going to sleep or other jobs firing on an idle condition.

Or you can just disable that stuff…

Old thread. Easel now runs a very small blank video to prevent sleep IIRC.