First do not turn off power to the controller or the computer. Do not unplug the USB connection on either end. Either of these and all is lost.
You need to terminate the failed instance of UGCS. Most likely the serial port will be left in an indeterminate state. If you are on Windows then you can disable and then enable the serial port to clear the error.
Bring UGCS back up and see if you can connect to the serial port, however, do not do anything else at this point.
Let me know what happened.
(I have about an hour to work on this and then I have to break for some work for about an hour)
Enter on command line or use buttons on “Machine Control” tab? Maybe it doesn’t matter??? Just a reminder, the milling bit is down in one of the holes and can’t move much in the X or Y directions.
Entering “?” returns “Ok”. However, I think I made a big mistake. In trying to get back to the bottom of the console, I hit the down arrow key a few times. That caused the spindle to move and smack up against the inside of the hole a couple of times. It didn’t go far, of course, but it did move. Damn!
I would guess the bit was touching the bottom of the hole since it was in the midst of carving when the error occurred. As mentioned in my previous post, I moved the spindle sideways, but not up and down.
I think I hit the arrow key 3 times, but I’m not sure. Because the units were inches the spindle beat up on the side of the hole for a few seconds before stopping. My carving has been done in mm.
Ok, at this point your best option to save the material is to take it off the machine and finish it manually. If you just have to make the holes deeper and trim the outside you might be able to do that by hand.
Since the machine moved we would not be able to recover machine zero.
That’s the lesson I’ve gotten from all this too. I will get myself educated on how to home my X-Carve. I’ve also read that others identified the original error message to possibly be related to electrical interference around the USB cable. The one I use is relatively long since my laptop is a little ways from my X-Carve. Plus, I don’t think its of the highest quality.
Right…I intend to upgrade my grbl to the latest from JTech. Again, thanks so much for your help. May I ask how you became so knowledgeable? Are you a hobbyist like me (but with way more experience) or is this area your profession?