Manually moving gantry while machine is off

X-Carve
1

So, I’m aware that when you push the x-carve along any of it’s axis, while it’s off, the stepper motors generate electricity, which you can see as it lights up the LED on the circuit board. Exactly how likely are you to fry the electronics doing this?
I do it all the time when a project is finished to get the gantry out of the way to remove the part.

Also, why isn’t there a persistent way in Easel to jog and shuttle the machine, making this unnecessary, instead of only having jog controls when your homing the bit? I did some googling and found some pendants, both commercial and DIY, but they all seem geared toward Mach3. I’d be happy with a software solution.

1 Like
2

i second that john …looked at loads of pendant controllers myself but as im not willing to pay for and learn how to use mach3 when i can use easel for free i would like there to b a way to incorporate pendant control into easel

3

UGS and Chilipeppr are free and have jog buttons available all the time when you aren’t carving. Chilipeppr also has pendant capabilities but I’m not familiar with them.

4

Reading through the Chilipepper thread, it doesn’t seem like a completely straight forward process, and just adds more steps. It looks like you still have to use some other program to generate the tool paths?