Thanks for the comment. I have never tried sand blasting but I know it can result in interesting patterns. In this case, the piece was just a conveniently sized scrap of CVG Fir from other projects, but it does add an additional effect to the carving.
I had a bad experience with pausing a job on lr4 via fluidnc. When I came back after about an 45min break. The “pause” button I had pressed to pause the program (and had changed to the play symbol) was now back to showing the pause icon, and had no effect when pressed. What is your procedure for long overnight pauses and resuming your work the next day?
I don’t do anything special except hit the pause button and turn off the router. Since this original message, I have started disabling the stepper timeout at the beginning of long projects so that I don’t have to worry about gantry changes. Then, at the end of the run, I add gcode that re-enables the timeout to 30 minutes or something. I have not done a lot with this yet, but it seems to work.
Note however, that I am NOT using FluidNC. My system runs Marlin on an SKR1.3. So, I have no experience with the issue that you experienced.
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Little defects or not, I always feel like I’m getting to audit a graduate level class in CNC wood carving when you show off your handywork, Dave. Awesome!
Aside from showing off your skills, it really shows how versatile an LR4 can be. A larger format machine that’s fully capable of detail work.
I’m curious about the best practice workflow for pauses in a big carving job.
I’d be pretty comfortable with my LR4s in leaving the jackpot powered and the steppers energized unattended. I’s running the router in any way shape or form that I would never do without being physically present.
Edit: Something weird happened for me when viewing this older thread. I think I was reading it way out of order/date. Still, looking at that carve I’m impressed with what the LR4 can do.
I imagine that the “best practice” depends a ton on exactly the setup one uses.
In my case, after hitting the Pause button (remember that i use Marlin, running from an SD card… no pc attached), the next critical thing is turning off the router, of course. It simply cannot run unattended.
My current practice is to add lines at the beginning of a carving step that disable the motor timeout and then re-enable it at the end of the carving step. The controller remains on so the motors remain engaged.
In my case, the one “threat” is a power failure, which fortunately is not frequent. But that could be addressed by having the controller on a small UPS.
And your comment about the versatility of the LR4 is also on the money. I think it takes some extra effort to make sure that the machine is tuned up for both large and small scale, but so far, the evidence is that it’s possible.
I understand the pause button gives you flexibility, but another strategy is to break the gcode file into multiple files. Just remember to add any start or end code that you want to each of the files. This way you can rehome and it will start on the next step. I am not sure if the homing is accurate enough for this level of detail though.