Carbide motion doesn't let my laptop go to sleep?

[jwhendy (John Hendy)]

I’m on vacation and have been machining most of the day, leaving Fusion and CM up and running when I go to sleep. I operate on a 3 season porch (cold when I’m not running a heater), so I’d been bringing in the laptop but leaving the charging cable plugged in on the porch.

Morning after morning I’ve found my computer run dead (battery runs down and it forces shutdown), and suspected something was waking it from sleep in the night. If you google things like “computer wakes from sleep” or “how to stop computer waking from sleep windows 10” you will see the maddening hell that is this path of troubleshooting.

Most suggest making sure devices can’t wake your computer, looking into wake timers, task scheduler settings, etc. One new one proposed running powercfg -requests from the windows command line, which I interpret to be showing software currently requesting… resources? staying awake? something…

After all the typical solutions in windows forums, I was not expecting this in a million years:

>powercfg -requests
DISPLAY:
None.

SYSTEM:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume3\Program Files (x86)\Carbide\carbidemotion.exe

AWAYMODE:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume3\Program Files (x86)\Carbide\carbidemotion.exe

EXECUTION:
None.

PERFBOOST:
None.

ACTIVELOCKSCREEN:
None.

This is after disconnecting the Shapeoko, so it’s not like I tried to put it to sleep with the USB plug in. I quit CM last night and it finally slept, not shutting itself down due to lower power last night. Has anyone else seen this before? At least the fix was easy (close CM), I just wonder if something in the code is unexpectedly creating this forced wake situation that the C3D team should be aware of.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

I would suspect that this is intentional — it would be disastrous if a computer went to sleep while CM was running and moving a machine — just quit out of it when you do wish to sleep.

[jwhendy (John Hendy)]

Sure… but it’s not connected and it knows this (red warning that it’s not connected to the machine after I remove the USB). I would think running/connected states and “open but not doing anything” could easily employ different logic.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

That would be something @robgrz would have to speak to — I suspect it’s simpler just to set the executable as part of setup and close it on exit rather than adding it to the connection/disconnection sequence.

[jwhendy (John Hendy)]

Beyond me I’m happy to just close it now that I figured it out, it was just surprising behavior and thought I’d bring it up. Your point makes sense with respect to a possible reason for having this behavior, it just wasn’t something I’d have considered before hearing that, and waking up to a dead battery and lost work was undesirable (and confusing since this behavior is non-trivial to diagnose due to all the other possible causes).

Maybe just publish this fact in release notes or something? “Carbide Motion intentionally prevents the computer from going to sleep.” [which I think is more accurate; I don’t think it was waking up, I think the lid close wasn’t triggering sleep at all, but I wasn’t watching the lights to observe that and thought it was waking in the night.]