one of the things i really like about Easel was the ability to stop the job without homing and just jog the machine,.
like right now i have had to do an E stop (more on that later) - the bit is half an inch in material - i want to move the tool up safely.
frankly i don’t trust the homing switches at this point - with the “Suckit Dust Boot” installed all kinds of Z height problems and offsets and such are complicating my jobs. ugh.
so - all i want to do i move the tool up to a safe height and jog it out of the way.
I agree with you. Same issue was the subject of one of my last comments. The problem with Carbide 3D is that they become deaf when somebody highlight a program error and there are people in this forum that protects the company against bad comments.
Given Miguel’s last comment was 4 years ago, and this is a reply to a 5 year-old post, perhaps many of the program errors Miguel experienced have been rectified in the meanwhile?
For example, the “Pause” function seems to do what the OP wanted.
Probably error is not the right term in this case. I am referring to the homing obligation. In order to use the job function I have to home the machine first which does not have any sense to me. I had a couple of incidents where the cnc lost connection and the bit got stuck into the material. It is very difficult to move the Z axis up manually when using the new Z carrier. There are two other things that I think are more important than the homing gate. One is the routing area: the program should advise the user when the machine will go beyond the routing area. The second one is the movement that the machine initially does when starts a new job: the machine comes down and the move forward; I think the logical way to go is forward and then down in order to avoid hitting a clamp or other thing in the way.
The homing cycle/initialization is unfortunately mandatory. Without it, the machine doesn’t know where the spindle is since it needs to remind itself where the “edges” of the machine are.
I’ve had the issue with the disconnection and the spindle stuck in the material. I did find that resetting everything and reinitializing the machine caused the spindle to rise out of the stock, which was a relief.
I agree entirely that Carbide Motion should warn that the current job doesn’t fit in the machine’s work area. This is a good idea.
I also agree with the movement of the machine when the job starts can often be counterintuitive. The first time I used the preprocessor for Vectric’s VCarve from @neilferreri it scared the life out of me. It brought the spindle front and centre and then plunged down to the Z height and then skimmed a couple of millimetres above the stock to the first cutting point. If I’d have had any clamps it would have collided. I fixed this issue by changing the order of the axis operations in the pre-processor.
I understand the importance of the homing operation but this is no so important for jogging the cutter around. Jogging should be allowed while running or setting zero is not allowed without homing.
You cannot jog when running a job because the machine is running a job.
You can jog when it is not running a job.
Whenever you are jogging, you can set the zero.
Jogging doesn’t require any homing other than the one that happened when you turned the machine on and initialized.
(edit: setting zero or jogging in order to set the position of the machine without “homing” would be totally pointless. You wouldn’t be able to run a job or do anything meaningful)
Hi Gerry, I think I failed to explain my point. I just said that moving the machine around for the purpose of cleaning the wasteboard after a failure doesn’t need the homing. For instance, Moving the spindle up after a failure to be able to remove the piece or the clamps doesn’t need homing. By the way, setting zero is relative to the gcode not to the home position so in that sense homing is not required. In my opinion homing is only required as you said to tell the machine where the edges are; but in the case of carbide motion this information is not used.
I don’t find the homing arduous, myself, since it takes around than 30 seconds and it removes the spindle from the work area for cleaning. So for me, it serves the purpose you described.
Also, I use a bitsetter, so there is no useful operation I can do on the machine that works without it being homed.
Sounds like you need to adjust the Z “home” height in Vcarve?
I agree, though. I prefer using machine coordinates for safe Z heights. So many users are used to the way that Vcarve has done it since the beginning. I’m not sure that I should force them to think like I do. Maybe I should?
Altering the VCarve retract height would also reduce the chance of hitting anything. (I agree )
I think I’ll keep the order of these lines as I have them below, though. With these the other way around it was plunging down at the position you change a tool, then whizzing across the machine to the X/Y position. I prefer X/Y before Z.
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