I have a upcoming carve with a time estimate of 33 hours. What would be the best way to stop the carve at the end of the day and restart the following day. Using longmill 48/30 with limit switches and running gsender.
Hi @Mickus - can you break the carve down into roughing and finishing passes? I don’t know what software package you are using, but with Fusion 360 I would use two techniques to break things apart:
- roughing / clearing passes to hog out the bulk material as needed, with stock-to-leave turned on
- passes at different limited depths, to break the work down into steps / pieces
I would then generate the toolpaths for each separately, probably trying to keep them in 6 hour chunks. What software are you using? I’m sure we can sort options out accordingly…
Ed, I am using vcarve pro, and yes I can do a roughing pass first but saving time on the finishing pass is minimal and overall time is greater. Though I am confident the actual time of carve will be less than estimated it will still be a 2 to 3 day process. My concern is the best way to ensure when I stop the carve on one day I restart the next day exactly where I left off.
Does VCarve allow you to set depth limits, so you could do 1/3 or 1/2 of the depth at a time in separate carves?
The other thing that can be done is to insert a manual pause gcode (M0 I think) where you want things to stop - but I have only done that within Fusion, not by editing the gcode itself. The mill pauses when it hits that gcode and waits for you to press resume.
One concern I would have of doing it that way is you would need to leave gsender up, and the mill powered up and connected until you hit resume the next day.
I’m out of my depth with how to split the file into multiple carves with VCarve though - maybe someone more familiar can help out. I would think ideally breaking it up into two (or three) separate jobs would be the most robust.
I hear what you are saying Ed but doing partial depth to get 2 separate carves will only double the carve time. I have thought about pausing, but would have to leave everything powered up overnight so i could resume the following day. I think there is a way in gsender to stop the job shut down then restart and resume from a specified line in the gcode, but not sure how to do it. maybe someone who has done long carves will chime in.
Ok I have found what I need to do. It is in the gsender docs “start from line”. Duh.
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