Hi, I’m just wondering if taking my flash drive that I store all of my projects on out of my shop computer after I load the file into Carbide motion will the project run properly still or do I need to leave the flash drive in?
If you copy the file locally and then run it from that local directory it may be ejected, and I would argue this is best-practice.
Not something I’ve tried though it is something I have been curious about.
I would say that the most likely result of pulling the USB drive out while running a job would cause Carbide Motion to error out when it tries to access the drive for more data - unless it copies the entire file into active memory when loaded up. Maybe one of these days I’ll give it a test to see what happens.
But unless you’re willing to test it yourself, best to not pull the USB drive while running a job.
Carbide Motion should have pulled the entire file into memory — it has to do that to display the wireframe preview.
That said, it’s a better thing to copy it to a local readable directory.
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I dont know the internals of CM but as @WillAdams indicated the whole file is loaded into memory. However the whole file is not downloaded to CM. The usb connection keeps sending parts of the file as the job progresses. So the only way to find out would to to try it. However why remove the drive during execution of the job. If you are going to go to another computer to work on other projects that means leaving your Shapeoko running without supervision. That can lead to disaster. Fires have been started when a machine is left unattended. The material can come loose and the router is still moving around can and has started fires.
There is a series of hats and shirts that state “Dont blame me I was unsupervised”. So if your Shapeoko starts a fire while unsupervised dont blame the Shapeoko blame yourself. You do not have to sit right in front of your Shapeoko but you need to be within ear shot so you can stop things if they go wrong.
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I take my thumb drive out all the time after I start my jobs. No issues with it yet.
From the Carbide Motion point of view, it’s safe to remove the drive when the machine is running.
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Question: Does it matter the size of the file you are working with? Would large files possibly be an issue?
I go on the SAFE side and just pull the files from the Thumb Drive onto the Laptop Desktop and use that for loading New Files.
Nope, the whole file is loaded into memory when you select it, so we do not depend on the drive after that.
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I upload my cut files to my iCloud account (don’t use it for much else, prefer my own home “cloud” for important stuff).
I prefer my own control of files. I tried Easel but did not like the fact that it is cloud based. The same for F360. Although you can save your files locally just being a cloud based application turned me off of it. I like having my application and files locally and under MY control and not someone else’s. I used to work in enterprise computing for Sun and Oracle and the surprising amount of backup failures of corporate customers would shock you. My own backup could fail but I keep my backup on two different drives so even if one fails I still have the other to depend on. The world is becoming more and more centralized with the cloud but for me I want my stuff local and under my control. In the cloud who knows who can see what you are doing. My Norton 360 wants me to back up to the cloud and it is difficult to turn that off and get local backups but I figured it out. The Norton cloud backup is just a revenue stream because the space they give for free would not work for most people. The cloud may be the future but not for me.
I remember when a 40MB disk was huge. My 1TB laptop drive only has 15gb available. In the ancient times of computing 15gb might have been enough for the majority of storage in the world. Now it is a .0000000000000000001% of the worlds data. The world runs on data.
I started running back and forth with a thumb drive. I found it inconvenient. The computer running the CNC has it’s own Gmail account so I just email the files from my design computer in the office.
I also have the CNC computer projecting a copy of the monitor to my office. I added a webcam that’s mounted to look over the table when in use. When I set up a carve, the Carbide Motion covers almost half the screen and the webcam covers a bit less than half. Using a Miracast plug in on a TV in my office, i can monitor the operation as well as see the Carbide motion screen at a glance. If something goes sideways, i am just a few steps away and I can hear the sounds of the machine so that is also a huge indicator.
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