Hay All, How’s it going - Just finished watching Mike Bogarts YouTube video on the subject. I have been pondering how to implement a UPS on the 1F. My issue is how to shut down the controller first before before the router or spindle so the controller does not try and move after the spindle is off breaking the bit or ruining the project. Ideal situation would be to have the UPS send a signal to the controller and have the controller do a clean shutdown. Is it possible the break out board can accept a shutdown signal or monitor a DC voltage and do a shutdown.
Were you able to find anything on this?
I received my 1F recently, but have yet to make a carve.
I have a good amount of experience with raspberry pi’s and UPS’s, and at that level it is possible (assuming the UPS in question has data connectivity to the pi). I typically use NUT for this, but there’s an APC one as well.
What I’m not sure about is the ability to install NUT (or 3rd party software in general) on the controller. I’ve done a quick forum search, but have not seen any relevant results regarding this. If anyone is aware of one, please let me know.
In short, if we can install 3rd party software and the UPS has data connectivity (ie data cable directly to controller or the UPS has network connectivity) then the NUT setup is relatively trivial. However, there would be a time delay between receiving the “on battery power” signal and initiating then completing the shutdown procedure, which would necessitate the router or spindle also having some sort of backup power. You can also adjust the NUT setup to account for flickers or brown outs, so that there is a time delay or battery percentage delay before initiating the shutdown sequence.
For what it’s worth, I’m contemplating running 2 UPS’s - a smaller with data connectivity for the controller, then another for the spindle (if using a router, then the 2nd one would likely need to be a pure or true sine wave UPS, which is typically more expensive).
You cannot install 3rd party software on the controller.
While unfortunate, I do understand.
Is there any chance we can get NUT (or another UPS software) added to the controller via official methods? It’s GPL, so licensing shouldn’t be a problem.
Being able to initiate a shutdown when on battery power could save the users a lot of money by helping to prevent broken bits or workpieces.
Most if not all UPS out there have either a serial rs232 style output or a NO switched connection that will indicate when there’s a loss of power - you could use that to an Arduino to initiate an e-stop on the controller and control an IoT relay to stop the router.
Alternately you could take a low tech dead man switch where you have a 12vdc power brick plugged into the wall that holds a relay open and and control the e-stop that way… if you lose power at the wall, the relay closes and you get an e-stop.
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I see where others are installing 3rd party software. I understand that this is not supported in anyway, but are there any plans to actively stop this from occurring?
I’d be willing to roll the dice with NUT (given my familiarity with the software, and it’s relatively low impact) and install outside of supported flows as long as the ability was not going to be removed in a planned future release.
A deadman switch/12v relay could work, but would be the same result as not having a UPS, ie a hard stop without a grace period, which would likely not help the OPs scenario.
Ideally, we could tie the controller into the UPS and upon battery signal pause the job and raise Z to avoid ruining the work or breaking a bit.
One might could make that work via arduino, but that is definitely outside of I currently know how to do.
As far as I see it, the breakout board would only accept an e-stop signal so that’s as graceful as it would get. Unless you want to get into rebuilding the code yourself to change the behavior of the e-stop or another input it would be difficult to achieve a ‘raise z and pause’ feature