Hello everyone, I'm an high school science teacher and responsible for our school robotics team. A few months ago, we decided to buy a CNC router so our team could machine our own parts. For a few weeks, it worked very well with different plastics and some aluminium. Just before our school shutdown with Covid-19, we started running into this problem: Halfway or three quarters through the job, our laptop linked to the blackbox crashes. Let me say first, I’m really sorry for the lack of details (I’m not the one operating the CNC) Here's what I know: The laptop is fairly recent (it’s a one year old DELL with pretty good specs) The crashes always occur when working on aluminium. We don't have an error message for the CNC since the laptop instantly reboots with a fatal error recovery message. (I don't have screenshot or pictures since it happened more than 2 months ago and we didn't test the CNC since) So we're not sure if it's a crash or an overheat (or both) Does anyone know of this kind of problem? Any help would really be appreciated
What software are you using to control the CNC? I'll go with the assumption you're using OpenBuilds CONTROL software. The process of streaming the gcode to the CNC machine isn't terribly resource intensive. I wouldn't expect that to cause any sort of over heating issue. Nor should it cause a crash, short of some wonky driver issue / bug. Probably the most complicated/resource intensive parts of the software is the 3D Simulation. You can disable that under the Troubleshooting > Application Diagnostics button. That would be my first instinct, would be to disable that and see if the issue persist. Also, make sure the software is up to date. It is supposed to notify you of updates, but in some cases that hasn't been working correctly.
The above is good info but it sounds like a new-ish machine, so shouldn't need to turn off 3D viewer. (worth a shot though) Also make sure it has the correct FTDI driver Virtual COM Port Drivers - driver issues can make windows crash. Other than that a clean format may help - might have some other crudware, bloatware preinstalled
Thank you for your awnsers ! I forgot to say that we tried on 2 different laptops and both had the same issue
