How to safely pause
I have a 770 with full enclosure that I'm learning. I'm running gcode generated by Sprutcam. There are times I want to pause, maybe to brush away chips, reposition coolant, take a picture, whatever. If I hit stop it rewinds to the beginning. I have tried opening the enclosure door that stops feed, and I have it set to stop spindle too. Sometimes I hit stopfeed before doing so, sometimes not. Most of the times this works fine and it resumes when I hit cycle start. Yesterday, however, something weird happened. It was pocketing and keeping a constant z, but when it resumed it kept going down and down in z as it continued pocketing.
Why would it do this? Did I interrupt it at a bad moment? And is there a better, safer way to pause?
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Re: How to safely pause
In Pathpilot, feed hold or the space bar on the keyboard will pause the program, the spindle keeps running though.
cycle start will restart the program.
I havent had the Z problem you refer to with pathpilot?? were you using a conversational program? I dont use those so I cant be much help there.
I have never had the program make a miscue with pathpuilot, I have been using it since its inception on an 1100.
The Z problem happened several times in Mach 3 though.3
mike sr
Re: How to safely pause
Thanks, popspipes. So spacebar is a shortcut for feed hold. Good to know.
The gcode was generated by sprutcam.
Would the switch on the full enclosure affect anything? It stops the feed and (in my case) the spindle. Does it do anything else?
Re: How to safely pause
That I wouldnt know, I have the 1100 and no full enclosure, sorry.Originally Posted by shassel
edit:
Just a heads up, when you pause the program and the spindle is running it will leave a mark on the section you are cutting.
I usually dont pause until the end of the cut because of this, unless its an emergency.
Welcome to the forum!
mike sr
Re: How to safely pause
I don't know exactly what the controller does when the door switch is opened, but just as general practice I avoid using a safety device to stop a machine except in an emergency. If the machine stops motion at the hardware level, i.e. cuts power to the drive then you could have an issue with losing position. I always use the feedhold button to stop the machine, I can then restart it from there.
Re: How to safely pause
I'm still using Mach III on my soon to be 6 year old 1100. On the rare occasion I need to press feed hold, I just press the space bar and it stops. Then I hit cycle start again and it continues.
You can buy GOOD PARTS or you can buy CHEAP PARTS, but you can't buy GOOD CHEAP PARTS.
Re: How to safely pause
I generally wait until the tool isn't engaged (during a rapid or raised to a clearance height), hit pause, and then use the RPM override in Pathpilot and reduce spindle to 0%. Can leave it this way for hours without issue in my experience. To start back up, reset spindle to 100%, turn on coolant and hit go.
WW
Re: How to safely pause
I learned something new here! I didnt realize that you could stop the spindle completely with the slider or knobs controller, thats a handy feature, I had never tried it. I thought it would go to minimum rpm for the range it was in but it actually stops................
mike sr
Doing that right now waiting for pizza and a well deserved Friday beverage
Re: How to safely pause
From a purely code point of view, this is probably the best way. I can't think of anything that could mess with the resumption of the program like this... because the program is never stopped. There's a bit of risk involved in forgetting to start the spindle again before resuming feed. *snap* It might be a good practice to pull both the feed and rpm sliders down if you do this a lot. That way if you space out and click the cycle start button before bringing RPM back up it won't move and you'll have time to figure out what you did.
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