Table of Contents

Starting and Stepping

Six buttons and four keys drive a run. What each of them does is short to say; which of them you can press at a given moment is the part worth learning, because the availability of a button is what tells you where the run actually is.

Where it is

The Execution page at /execution. The transport sits in the run header at the top of the Control Tree pane in the left dock, above the Mission and Program roots, with the run-state badge at its right end. It is there whatever the tree has selected — so it stays reachable while you are editing a Mission command — and its keys keep working while the Control Tree row is collapsed. There is exactly one of it on the page, and it is the thing that binds F5 to F8.

The six controls

Control Key What it does
Start / Resume F5 Starts the run, or resumes a paused one
Pause F6 Holds the run where it is
Run one NC line F7 Advances by one line of the program
Run one machining step F8 Advances by one machining step
Stop — Ends the run
Reset — Unwinds the session back to the start

Start and Resume are the same button, not two: it reads Start from the beginning and Resume once the run is paused. The two single-advance buttons share one icon and are told apart by a small letter in the corner — L for a line, S for a step. Stop and Reset carry no key.

Reset unwinds in the background: the button shows a spinner while it works and the rest of the application stays usable.

One line is not one step

The two single-advance buttons exist because the two units do not line up. One line of program can produce many machining steps — a long move at a fine machining resolution is dozens of them — while another line produces none at all, because a tool change or a coordinate selection is a sentence with no motion under it. So advancing by one line and advancing by one step land in different places.

Use Run one NC line when you are following the program: it stops where the next line begins, which is where the program text you are reading changes. Use Run one machining step when you are following the cut: it stops at the next thing the machine did, which is the unit the Step Info column and the strip charts are keyed on. Stepping by step through a single long move is how you watch one cut develop; stepping by line skips straight past it.

What you can press, and when

The whole bar is dead until two things are true: a project is open, and the page's 3D canvas has connected to the service. The second one is easy to miss — the connection is what binds the run engine to this page, so a canvas that has dropped its connection leaves every transport button greyed even though the project is plainly loaded. The connection badge on the menu bar is where you check that.

With both in place, availability follows the run state:

Control Available while the run is
Start / Resume ready, or paused
Pause running
Run one NC line / Run one machining step ready, or paused
Stop running, paused, or finished
Reset any time a project is open

Nothing steps a moving run. Both single-advance buttons are unavailable while the run is going, so the way to step through something you are already watching is to pause first and then step. That is the single most useful thing in the table: the buttons are not refusing you, they are telling you the run has not stopped yet.

The bar at rest, with the demo project open and nothing run yet, at /execution. Start, the two single-advance buttons and Reset are live; Pause and Stop are greyed, because there is no run to hold or to end — and the two single-advance buttons carry the L and the S that tell them apart. The badge at the right end of the run header reads ready, and the block on the canvas is uncut.

The Execution page with the run header at the top of the Control Tree pane — the six transport buttons with the pause and stop buttons greyed, and a green ready badge at the right end — above the Mission root with its nine command rows, each with a checkbox and a drag handle and two of them unticked and dimmed, a + on the Mission row and on the two List rows, and the Program root listing four .ptp files and an inline entry; the Mission editor panel below reads Commands 9; the 3D canvas shows an uncut light-grey rectangular block on its grey fixture, and the Session Messages Shell tab reads No messages match the current filter

Reading the run state

The state sits at the right end of the run header, beside the transport, as a coloured badge — ready, running, paused, finished — pinned above the tree, so it stays in view however far you scroll the tree. When the left dock is narrowed the buttons scroll out of view before the badge does: the run state is the last thing a resize hides. The footer along the bottom of the window carries the session's own messages.

The same page with the mission paused part way through. The badge reads paused in orange, Pause is grey, and Stop has joined the live ones — so the bar alone tells you a run is open and held. On the canvas the tool path the run has laid down so far is now drawn over the block, and the tabs under it are counting what the run has reported: Shell is badged with the eleven messages the load and the run have written between them and NC Diagnostics with the one the parser raised, while Step Diagnostics and NC Manipulation carry no badge at all.

The Execution page with the run header at the top of the Control Tree pane — the six transport buttons with only the pause button greyed, and an orange paused badge at the right end — above the Mission root with its nine command rows and the Program root with its five entries, the Mission editor panel below reading Commands 9, the 3D canvas showing a gold disc cutter sunk into the top face of the white block on its grey fixture with a single thin tool path entering from the upper left and dropping straight down in green to it, the Session Messages Shell tab badged 11 and NC Diagnostics badged 1 over a list of system messages, and a footer reading Ready

The keys, and where they stop

F5 to F8 are bound only while the Execution page is the one on screen. On every other page F5 is the browser's own reload, and the same is true here in two cases: when the button a key drives is unavailable at that moment, and when the focus is inside a text field.

Warning

That exception bites hardest on F5 during a run. Start is unavailable while the run is going, so the key falls through to the browser, the page reloads, and the session goes with it. Pause with F6 first.

See Also