Wierd glitch today??

I had a weird glitch today while setting up a job.

While setting up my 770, (Pathpilot V 1.9.13), I was jogging my edge finder in .001 mode, about to touch my edge,
when suddenly the machine goes "CLICK! CLUNK!!!" … and all motion stops.
The computer screen was still on... no alarms, but the mouse no longer worked, and no motion in jog.
Everything was still on, but it seemed to be in E-stop mode?

Very odd.... No movement or response at all.

So, I had to do a hard-shut down. Turned off the computer. Waited 60 seconds, and fired everything up again.
After re-starting & referencing, everything seemed to be working like normal, EXCEPT all of my Tool offsets reverted back to the past settings?

Very odd...……….

Any ideas on which kind of Gremlin got into my machine?
Has anyone experienced this before?
Thanks! -Russ

Mouse not moving suggests a hardware issue with the PC especially if all motion stopped abruptly
since this would happen if the motion hardware stopped being serviced by Path Pilot/LinuxCNC
and that usually requires something really major going agley.

You might look in /var/crash for some crashed application droppings,
but I suspect you had a kernel panic or something similarly bad which will not be logged

"Click-clunk" means that the controller board stopped controlling the mill.
"Mouse not moving" means the CPU isn't processing any more instructions -- the computer "halted" (or "hard locked" or "kernel crashed")
The image on the monitor is actually put there by the graphic card part of the computer, which is separate from the CPU that processes instructions.
Thus, if the CPU locks up, and just doesn't do anything more, then the graphics card will keep showing the last screen it was told to show, and the monitor will still show that.

So, why does this happen? There are two main root causes:

1) Random electrical fluctuations -- anything from "very dirty power spikes" to "USB wire wiggles" to "accidentally grounded some metal part that wasn't previously grounded" can cause hardware to misbehave and lock up.

2) Software bugs -- some collection of circumstances pushed some part of the system into a corner where it wasn't tested, and it ended up doing the wrong thing. Figuring out what's different in this case (when some circumstance might be, like "has been on for 24 days") is sometimes quite hard. Rebooting every morning often helps prevent some of these :-)

Reading this made me think I need to open controller and clean / blow out. While I'm at it I should do workstation also. not in shop but still attracts dust.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mountaindew

Reading this made me think I need to open controller and clean / blow out. While I'm at it I should do workstation also. not in shop but still attracts dust.

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That reminds that of course overheating (perhaps due to a clogged CPU heatsink) can cause a crash as can bad memory