Stop and Restart Your CNC Tool Path
George VondriskaDescription
There are times when you can’t allow a CNC tool path to run completely from start to finish. Some CNC toolpaths, like 3D carvings, have exceptionally long run times. It’s also possible that you simply get called away from your shop and have to stop running your CNC mid-toolpath. Please don’t leave your CNC router running when you’re not in your shop.
Stopping a CNC tool path
Most machines have both a Pause button and a Stop button on the pendant. When you want to completely halt the tool path use the Stop button.
Saving the stop point
After you’ve punched the stop button on your fob you’ll get a message asking if you want to Save break or Discard break. Toggle to Save break and press the OK button. This takes you to a screen titled Break list. Use the up and down arrows to choose which line you want to save the toolpath on. Once you’re on the line you want to use, press the OK button. If there’s already a file saved there, this action will overwrite it. This process saves the CNC tool path at the precise line in the tool path you chose to stop at. The name of the saved break point will be the same as the name of the toolpath.
Restarting the tool path
Get the toolpath restarted by pressing Run and 1 at the same time. This takes you to the Break list, and you can toggle to and choose the line that contains your interrupted tool path. Press OK, and you’ll be back to the recognizable screen you typically see when you’re running toolpaths.
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Sometimes when you're running stuff on the CNC, you run into a scenario where you need to stop the tool path but you wanna come back to that exact same point. So it could be that, it's such an extensive tool path, you can't finish it today, 'cause you wanna go to bed. So here's how this works on this system. On your fob, and yours might look a little bit different but the approach will be similar. First thing, press Stop. Now, this is where it's important, gonna shut off my dust collector. At this screen, Save or Discard the break, we wanna save the break. So I'm gonna press, Okay. We can use these arrow keys to toggle between the two, but I wanna save. Then here, Break list. I can scroll up and down this. And I've got slots that are empty because I've never used 'em. If the slot is already got something in it, we can overwrite that. So at this stage, with that line highlighted, if I just press Okay, what I just did is I saved that tool path at that specific point. So now, we whatever, go do our stuff, go to bed, come back the next day. And now, what's really critical is, when we wanna run this, we're gonna start it a little bit differently, and you're gonna hit the Run key, the Run button and the 1 button at the same time. And that takes us to the Break list. And then here we can use the arrow keys, scroll up and down until we get the one we want. This tool path is Cookie, that's what I'm cutting on the machine right now is a cookie. So that's the tool path I was just on. When I click Okay, this is where we were. We stopped it on Line Number 65. If you wanna buy some insurance here, we could use the arrow keys and go from Line 65 to Line 64. And that would resume one line ahead of where we stopped it. But honestly, I find if I start again right where it stopped, it works out okay. From here, from this screen, Okay. And then that takes us back to this familiar screen. And then if you watch the machine when we come back, this is where it's interesting and cool is that it's not gonna start its cut in the center of the cookie which is where the tool path actually starts, it's gonna come out here to where we left off.
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