Hi,
Newbie here — isn’t the M5 command in the Pause event under gSender Automations supposed to stop the spindle when you hit pause during a job?
Hello @Pelibob , by default the pause button only stops the XYZ motion not the spindle. To do this you have to hit stop or the e-stop. Remember your line number before you do this so that you can pick up around where you left off by using the Start From Line option.
Alright, so there’s no way to stop the spindle when pause is activated. The only option is to stop the program and then restart it from where it left off.
Thanks Karver_One
Well there might be a way to change that in the settings. I think @Chucky_ott knows a little about that. But by default it does not stop the spindle when you hit pause.
@Pelibob If you look at the console when you press the buttons, you can see which g-code commands are being sent to the controller. When pressing pause, nothing shows up, so I’m assuming it’s not sending a real pause command but rather just suspends running any additional lines in the current file. So short of stopping the job and using Start From Line, I don’t know how you would stop the spindle when pausing.
@Chucky_ott @Karver_One @Pelibob Couldn’t you create a simple keyboard shortcut macro that sends the pause command and the M5 command. It could then be tied to one of the programmable buttons on the estop fixture. Obviously, it could be run from the keystrokes, too.
@gwilki @Pelibob @Karver_One I tried to manually enter M5 in the console while the job was running and while paused and nothing happened. I assume it won’t accept any commands until the job has actually stopped. When pressing pause, the job is on “hold”.
I also started the spindle without loading a file (from the spindle tab at the bottom right) and then typed M5 in the console. THAT did stop the spindle.
@Pelibob FWIW, I had the same results as @Chucky_ott . Upon reading up on this, it seems that this is a limitation of grbl. It has nothing to do with gSender.
Yes, maybe! I created a macro to stop the spindle, but when a program is running, the macros are no longer accessible. I’m going to try using the buttons on the e-stop.
@Pelibob My suggestion doesn’t work. The M5 command in the macro will not run while the machine is in pause/feed hold condition. My idea to use the estop buttons was simply to assign the macro to one of those buttons to make it easier to execute.
Can we back up a bit? Why do you want to pause and kill the spindle? Is this for a bit change? If so, you can use gSender and the M6 command to pause execution and kill the spindle.
The other day, during a surfacing job, I had to adjust my dust shoe because it was set too high—and doing that while the spindle was still running wasn’t ideal 
@Pelibob Understood. I’ve been in similar situations. I don’t have a spindle, so it is easy for me to simply turn off the Autospin to do an adjustments. I don’t see a way to turn the spindle off within grbl, but someone from Sienci may well prove me wrong.
Thanks for your time.
@Pelibob You’re very welcome.
I haven’t completely given up. I want to explore using the “door open” process to make this work. I just need to figure out how the SLB pins this out. It will mean a physical switch, but as I understand the door open thing, when the controller senses an open door, it pauses execution and kills the spindle.
If @KGN is reading this 
, I’m sure that he can educate all of us.
You can send RT:0x9E during runtime to stop the spindle while in feedhold 
@LightBurnSupport Tks. Do you mean that while in feed hold status, you can send that command in the console? If so, presumably it can be sent with macro.
Does the spindle start when “resume” is pressed?
You can’t send it in the console, it’s a binary command. You might need to put some Dev into it
@LightBurnSupport Sure, tease us, then walk away.
A little hacky but should work. I’ll go plug into my altmill and see what I can do here.
-cw