I have a routing job that won't finish in one day. How can I shut Mach3 & my router off and restart it at the stopping point the next day?

What I've done in the past is just stopped it from routing, and left the power on over night, then resumed routing the next morning, but if the power goes out, I'm screwed.

Thanks!
Chris

Best way is to fit decent home switches and you wont be bothered with that problem again, in fact its really the only way.
Routing however is not as critical as metal machining so you may get away with just having persistent DROs chosen on General config page and shutting down. Problem will be is your axis will move slightly due to the microstepping falling to the nearest full step and also you may get some slight motor movement when you power up.

Hood

Hood,

My machine does home to within 2-3 thousandths each time, so I'm thinking that's pretty good.  How do I skip ahead in the machining file so I don't have to run from the beginning?

Thanks!

Chris

If you have a licence for Mach you can use Run From Here, you just click the G-Code window and scroll to where you want to start then press Run From Here. If you know the line number you can type that into the line number DRO and do the same.
 If you dont have a licence then afraid you cant do it as its one of the limitations of the demo version.
Hood

Yup, I'm a licensed user. Thanks for the info!

Chris

The few times I've done this I just stopped and shut down leaving the axis in position, I also write down the line number and ofset from home just in case.
As Hood said routing tends to be not that critical and I've never seen any problems using this method on a router.

Steve