Hi im new to using shapeoko 5 pro, ive made a few thing and am learning new things all time. I am trying to find out if i can adjust setting while running a job. i cant find any info on pausing and adjusting settings then restarting. any help would be much appreciated!
There is “Feed-Rate Override” which will increase/decrease movement rate while running a job.
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I mean like spindle speed or adjusting depth of cut
For spindle speed, my understanding is that that is in Grbl, just not exposed in Carbide Motion:
- Real-time Overrides : Alters the machine running state immediately with feed, rapid, spindle speed, spindle stop, and coolant toggle controls. This awesome new feature is common only on industrial machines, often used to optimize speeds and feeds while a job is running. Most hobby CNCs try to mimic this behavior, but usually have large amounts of lag. Grbl executes overrides in realtime and within tens of milliseconds.
Not sure if that has been put forward as a feature request or no — I would argue that testing should be done in discrete files so as to be a bit more controllable/repeatable:
Adjusting depth of cut has been asked for in the past, but doesn’t seem a reasonable option in terms of interface and programming — a work-around would be to note the current depth, then quit and re-make the job starting where it left off and adjusting the Depth per Pass in the new file.
That would be a nice little feature in CM, spindle speed override. Maybe have spindle speed adjusted in proportion to the feedrate override and/or just a small spindle speed override by itself. 
So you are saying to possibly have a override tab in CM that would allow for spindle speed override adjustment during operation of a program like we have already in the feedrate override? That would be a nice addition to CM. When I run the big CNC machines at the machine shop, I have control overrides that help me to pinpoint the optimal feed and speed if I don’t have it quite right in the program. Or if I have a program that is right and has been tested and ran before and proven right, then I run with a little duller tool then before, then I might need to decrease the spindle and feedrate a bit to save on the tool, unless it is a tool that I can go sharpen.
Sometimes I dont have room for error in the shop and we may only have one shot at machining the part right. I am tested at the highest of my ability to make sure to get 100% accuracy on some of my machining jobs. So, a feed and speed adjustment comes in handy when making sure the tool is cutting properly without breaking.
Correct. There are times where bumping up the feed rate was very handy but in the back of my mind I’m thinking a bit more RPM along with that increased feedrate would be appropriate.
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But sometimes bumping up the spindle speed does the opposite effect as what we think would happen when speeding up the feedrate. But even adjusting the speed lower would be a great help as well.
I run this one job where a use a 3" cutter blade that cuts splines in the end of a blender shaft. The blade only spins at 60rpms. The diameter of the cutter means it moves a lot faster at the cutting point further out on the cutter blade. Of course I am only feeding the tool at 1.5" incremental. I have seen inexperienced machinist try to speed up drill bits and blast them apart, which in turn, means I have to go in with a solid carbide endmill to cut out the melted tool and the heat treated metal in order to finish cutting the hole to depth.
Let us pray that support sees all of our suggestions and add them soon down the line. I would like to get these updates long before I get past my first year of no cost updates. I would hate to have paid $150 per update for the big batch of updates that came thru awhile back. I would already have been around $1000 in on updates. Fingers crossed on getting this new option.
Depth of a cut, you probably need to stop the job, fix the file and restart.
I am new as well – I have got into the habit of creating multiple groups in my tool paths so i can disable group(s) to run only certain parts of the job. This is helpful when you are unsure about things like depth. If you run that portion separately, you can stop, adjust and kick it off again. As long as you don’t remove the stock, you can stop/restart or run individual tool path groups independently and know that the job will stay in alignment.
A spindle speed adjustment on the fly is something I’ve requested a while back. But now that they have 2 spindle options, it seems more pertinent to add.
Having ran industrial mills in areospace, I’ve never seen any control that will change depth of cut on the fly. Changing spindle speed is a simple change to the interpretation of one line of gcode. Changing depth of cut is far more complex and potentially hundreds of lines of gcode. And the machine wouldn’t know which Z moves are for a depth of cut, and other moves.
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