We had a power outage here today. My mini-mill, of course, stopped. But, the X32 was still powered (through the USB and the laptop's battery), and the laptop merrily kept sending gcode to the X32 (I presume). Turned everything off before power returned. Am repositioning, changing the gcode, manually milling off some cruft, so everything can continue. Newbie question: what would have happened had I not stopped the laptop before the power returned? Worst case: once power returned, the gcode commands at that moment being sent are executed, probably causing significant mayhem. Second question: could we get an alarm if the power drops? Thanks in advance, Stan
yeah. mayhem, you do want to stop the job before power restores no, there is no pin available to sense it, and no protocol in the communications between PC and Blackbox, that would allow for this specifically, one could report a general error I think, but that hinges on knowing the power is off, for which you need a pin, restart this sentence (-: I have worked through many power failures, so long as you have a good home it is a 'not a problem' since the Blackbox stores the offsets from home to your work zero. What I do is power off the router manually raise Z so the bit is clear of the work. wait for power to restore home do a goto x0 y0 and check all is well. re-probe Z height restart the job from the nearest previous Z height change - generally jobs work down in Z layers, so just restarting the current layer is sufficient.
If you fit an "electro magnetic" switch between the wall and your machine, when power comes back on it will stay off until you reset it Amazon.com or Amazon.com And does double duty as e-stop in case of emergency The switch has an internal coil, that keeps contacts closed. When power goes out, coil loses power, contacts open. When power comes back on, the contacts stay open
