I’m not sure who will see this, but hoping that this is a good forum that perhaps the C3D team may notice… There’s been lots of great features added to software, but I’d love to see some more “toggle” options in Carbide Motion.
I do a lot production runs, and with the Bitsetter and the IOT Relay, there’s a lot of time wasted on pop ups and excessive movement. Specifically, I’d love to see a way to quickly turn on and off the Bitsetter functions so that I can use my Bitsetter for one-off carves with multiple bits, but can turn it off when I’m doing a ton of sequential cuts using the same bit and same zeros.
Also, I have the IOT Relay in use, so my spindle starts and stops using G-code commands. I would love to see a machine characteristic option to disable the “turn the spindle on” and “turn the spindle off” pop up windows. I multitask in the shop when doing production runs, and it’s frustrating that I have to wait a few more seconds after starting a cut to click the OK button before I can truly walk away, and the spindle stopping over the workpiece causes me to come back to hit the button and wait a few more seconds before I can start unclamping my workpiece. These pop ups are not applicable to anyone with a relay (I know many have this feature), and it’s even more frustrating since I don’t believe there is at least a quick keyboard method to click the OK on the pop ups (?), such as a quick ENTER keystroke. I have to trackpad over to the button and click it.
I know that these sound nit-picky, but at least for me, they would be a tremendous timesaver. I use my XXL dozens of hours every week, and 80% of the time I’m doing production runs and cycle times are very important. I spend a lot of time designing clamping jigs to streamline my material placement/clamping process. I’d really like to make the software side of it as efficient as possible too. I hope someone on the programming side is listening
You can already do this with one click in the CM settings pane. We should have a beta of CM 500 in the next week and that will make it just a little quicker.
This is already in the internals of CM, we should be adding it to the settings page before too long.
Well this is certainly reassuring! Thanks for the quick response, and I’m excited to see that these are on the horizon.
As far as the CM settings pane, I can never figure out when changing something is going to re-flash the machine, or require a re-flash before the updated selections take effect. I am a victim of “carriage crash” because of the updated rapid position location changes for those with an HDZ (and a Suckit or PWNCNC boot). So I’m always hesitant to change those settings because I’ve done the MDI changes to bandaid my carriage crash issues and feel like re-flashing the machine would erase that. I haven’t done a ton of testing or research on this, so forgive me if I’m just kinda working on the cautious side. Every time I think of experimenting and testing, I’m too involved in a process that could backfire on me.
So that also brings me to another point, is the “Carriage Crash” issue with HDZ and Z-independent dust boots also a fix on the horizon? The Sweepy isn’t for everyone, and even if it was, some of us are already invested and satisfied with our Z-independent dust boots that were once supported.
And I guess one more since we’re already here. On the CM settings page, the drop down always reverts to the smallest Shapeoko size, even if the machine is already flashed for XXL. This is confusing sometimes to see, and sometimes overlooked when re-flashing the machine and I end up with standard Shapeoko range limitations… It would be super helpful if this reflected what was actively installed on the machine, or at least switch to radial buttons to make it more obvious that “Shapeoko” isn’t the right answer and that better options are available. I typically refer to my CNC as “Shapeoko”, even though it’s actually a “Shapeoko XXL”. So my brain doesn’t instantly notice that the default drop down option is wrong.
