Pause No Longer Raising Z

My gut feeling, thinking about workflows, is that having a Pause button to click during an active job is the key here. A tick-box in preferences could be ‘on hit pause, raise Z or no-raise Z’. Once pressed, the ‘what next’ options could be:

  • Resume
  • Raise Z and move to Y $Max North (and remain with all 3 options to choose again after this)
  • Abort Job with $Homing cycle.

As I have the HLD signal on the Controller PCB wired to a physical pause button, I would distinctly prefer that pressing this physical button OR clicking the on-screen Pause button initiates the same sequence of events.

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@WillAdams does this mean, in the future, CC5 will be compatible with other machines?

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I would prefer a physical button to pause a workflow. Moving the mouse around to find the pause button on the screen could take too long leading to damage.

I’d be interested to know ow to achieve that, but my knowledge of electrics is limited to the content of a Ladybird book.

@NewToThis Over the coming weekend I will see if I can take snaps of the physical button and how it is wired up - primarily the Controller PCB end. It is simple enough wiring - but do appreciate that familiarity with electronics changes one’s perspective

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Thank you @AndyC :+1:

@NewToThis @AndyC There are a couple of good threads on this already. Here’s a link to one of them.

@ScottsdaleSteve wired up a momentary switch to his Feed hold and then guided me in doing it for my own setup…so my setup is on physical push button as well. In fact I discovered the change to the hold feature in 517 while using my physical button.

Here’s a photo of my set up. I used the black and yellow proximity wires (with their attached molex’s) to hook my switch to the feed hold pins on the board, since I had extras after my HDZ upgrade.The wire goes down under the table top when it exits the control box and then comes back up where I permanently mounted my pause switch (the green button). To be clear, that’s two separate wires, each with its own molex, because the molex’s are doubles and you need to hook your switch to the two outside pins of a three pin connector…so you can’t use the whole molex.

If you need advice in setting up yours, I’d be happy to do for you what Steve did for me!

  • Gary
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Let’s start by putting the retraction back in. @wmoy: Why was the feature deprecated in the first place? If there’s a good reason to remove it, then a check box option for whether or not you retract on pause (however you trigger the pause) makes sense and probably would have been a better resolution than deprecation.

I suppose you could add more features for what happens after the pause and retract. The most flexible option would be to allow me to jog the gantry after pausing (and retracting) - and have resume return me to that same location before plunging down and resuming. That’s currently not possible.

I believe, that’s a natural extension of offering it up for free for anyone to use, and as a commercial product in-and-of-itself.

There was for example discussion of a Shark post-processor:

@robgrz would have to speak to the specifics of that though.

I’ve been told that not retracting during a pause helps with cut accuracy. Also removing the parking really speeds up the pause and resume cycle.

Options would be nice, but I’m sure @robgrz has alot on his plate already.

This is not “Nice” - this is a take away without documentation and without options. It might have even been a mistake. It should be put back and, if there really is a problem with accuracy, then put it back with an option to select it in/out.

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Everyone will have their own workflows and opinions. I personally have never used a pause to do anything other than pause… maybe cleaning chips out of a slot manually once or twice.

If you’re having to mess with tooling because something went wrong then shouldn’t the toolpath just be restarted? What’s the real need for pausing and jogging the machine?

But, just because I’ve never had do it doesn’t mean others won’t. Yeah, options would be nice

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I’m not trying to be difficult, but there’s a basic principle of software development in play here. It’s just bad practice to change the way the product behaves without up-front communication and without some sort of backwards compatibility. You can’t really take something away and then say it would be “nice” to put an option in to keep it “if you’ve got the time”. Now, Carbide hasn’t actually said that…so I’m anxious to hear how they’re going to handle this. I’m hoping the parking is back in the product in the next release - with or without an option to turn it off/on.

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https://carbide3d.com/carbidemotion/download/

Fixed. I think it was an oversight, parking during pause was never broken on Nomad. Carry on with your machining.

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much thanks for getting this fixed quickly

Thank you! and 20 characters more to say just how grateful I am :slight_smile:

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Hi. I think there’s an issue with CM v518, too.

I was running a project requiring a tool change, and CM paused at the right time - but there was no prompt for the tool change, only Resume or Cancel (I think).

Anyway, clicking resume (I just assumed it paused before a second cut with the same tool) it then went on to cut the rest of the job - without attempting to reset the tool height on the BitSetter - which I kind of expected?

I’ve attached the files, in case it was me, but I’ll go back to v513 and see how that works!

Thanks

Splitter Enclosure 18mm ply.c2d (50.9 KB) Splitter Enclosure 18mm ply.nc (40.8 KB)

@NewToThis Just to clarify: Did it come to the front of the Shapeoko so you could change the bit, but just didn’t prompt the change - or did it just park in place over the spot where it was cutting?

I think it just parked in place over the spot it was cutting. I’ll check it again.

OK…because that’s just a regular Pause…not a tool change.

The flow for “correct” pause from 513 was motion starts and Z come up above the workpiece and waits. When you hit resume, it descends Z and then continues.

The flow for tool change is raise, prompt for spindle shutdown, jog to front and center, prompt for tool change, measure on the bitsetter, return to center and prompt for spindle up, return to project, descend Z and go.

I concur - and I didn’t pause the workflow, it did it itself - but I’ll check it now.