I’m new to the community and a happy brand new owner so far. My x-carve is 90 % built and on stand by waiting for my waste board. My question is, I use my home desktop to use v carve and get the just of using it. Lets say I’ve completed a tool path and ready to send it using either chili-pepper or Universal G code sender. Once this step is completed can I then put my g code on a usb drive and then use my shop laptop hooked up to my xcarve to make the item?
Look at using dropbox.com . If you setup both machines with dropbox, then save the file in a special folder, it will automatically appear on the other machine. Not only is it faster than manually transferring to a USB, it will cut down on errors. Also everything is then backed up to the cloud as well. It’s free for some amount of space, I think it was 2G when I started using it years ago.
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@Andy4us - We must have been typing at the same time, sounds like you and think alike!
/edit
I have the same setup, I use my desktop computer to run Vcarve and have a cheap laptop in the shop running UGS to send gcode to the X-carve.
I started off using a USB drive, but that got old fast, so now I save all my gcode files from Vcarve to a dropbox folder and then have UGS open that same dropbox folder. So not only are all my files instantly available to all my computers, I never need to worry about backing them up.
Oh ok, I do use dropbox for everyday stuff but didn’t really think about it this way. So I would send the gcode to my drop box and call it good?
Yep, I have one folder for the gcode files and another for the CRV files on dropbox.
Vcarve is very good about remembering the last folder location it used.
Sorry Allen whats the CRV file?
That is the actual project file that Vcarve creates. It has all the geometry and toolpaths.
I use Google Drive…as long as you have internet connectivity for both computers.
I typically design projects on the computer in my house, then I drop the file in the Google Drive folder. It does have to “upload” to the Drive, so if the file is large, expect it to take a little bit. When you power on the receiving computer, it’ll have to “sync” on that end, so there could be a slight delay before the file is available.
I just use the shared folders in Windows.
I’m another Dropbox user. I have a desktop in my shop and one in my office. I also have a laptop I use when chilling in front of the TV and when we’re on the road. Nearly everything I do goes into folders in Dropbox and gets synced to all three PCs.
I separate my files by project, so I have a directory (folder) tree something like: CNC/Projects/Plaques/Arnold. Everything associated with the “Arnold” plaque - *.crv, graphics, gcode files - all go into that folder. Any change made while working on any of my PCs is synced to the others immediately (or the next time I turn it on).
Dropbox and Google Drive are workarounds but it seems silly (and risky) to put your file on a remote server hundreds of miles away so that you can move it downstairs to the workshop.
Mac OSX and Windows (and Linux too of course) have great file sharing capabilities. As long as both computers are on the same network you should be able to pretty easily set up a shared folder, or access one computer from the other.
Yes, you are right, although I would debate the risk part happily if this were the right forum. What a shared folder does not achieve is backup. My main machine has run through 4 hard drives in the last 3 years. Part of my way of dealing with the dangers of storage is by making sure that my data not only gets easily moved between machines ( I have 3 on site which have full copies of 70G worth of data, photos, movies etc ), but also full copies offsite. As the person who other families have come to fix broken computers, it really sucks to have to tell people that I can get 50% of their photos, taxes etc but the rest are lost.
Yes, as a concept it is “silly” to upload a file on one machine to the cloud, and then download on another machine, just to transfer ( dropbox will often do machine to machine btw ), but the advantage of seamless backup should never be underestimated.
I’ve been a professional software engineer for over 20yrs, dropbox is one of the few commercial software items that I’ve used that has “just worked”, and my home machines are a mixture of Windows and Linux.
Fair enough. We both have different ways of going about moving our files around.
My computers are connected via home network. I save my tool paths to a shared folder and have a desktop shortcut on the garage computer to use my files from. I run windows 7.