What's your job restart procedure?

gSender ❓ Question
1

Hi,
I had an occasion this weekend to stop a job about 3/4 of the way through so I could pick it back up and finish it the next day. Here’s what I did:

  • Paused the Longmill
  • Made note of the gcode line it was on (so I could use the gsender start at line number feature)
  • Left the Longmill where it was, turned my Raspberry Pi off and hit the E-Stop on the Longmill

The next day my thought process was that I’d fire up the Raspberry Pi, load the file in gsender, turn on the Longmill and start the job from the line it was on.
Unfortunately that wasn’t exactly how it went in practice. I had just installed the inductive homing switches and had enabled the homing cycle so as soon as I turned on gsender it wanted to home the machine to the front left corner. Since I couldn’t do anything else I let it home, then manually moved it back to where it was before and started the job at the line I wanted. The piece turned out fine but I’m thinking there has to be a better way to restart a job.
I have since disabled the homing cycle so it won’t want to home every time it’s turned on in case I’m restarting a job. Just curious what everyone else’s job pause/stop/restart procedure is?

Thanks!
Mark

2

@MColeman, Mark, With the inductive homing switches installed you can use “work offsets.” I’ve played with them a bit and they seem to work well. Basically you establish what I’ll call absolute X,Y, Z zero for the machine through homing. Then you you establish X,Y,Z zero for your work piece and set that as one of the available workspace offsets (like G54). The LM controller will remember the work offset settings even through a power cycle, so if you ever have an event that causes the LM to lose it location (like a power cycle or the router running into a misplaced clamp) you can accurately get back to the XYZ zero of your work piece, assuming it’s still secured in the same place on your waste board.

3

I think you can skip homing at startup if you dont want to. In the kit instructions there is a hint where to find the “unlock” button in gSender.