PRIME MOTIONTroubleshooting
Find what you are seeing. Each entry says what it means before it says what to do — a fix you do not understand is one you will need again next week.
Tabs are greyed out and will not respond
Run, Projects, Macros and History unavailable. The machine has not been homed. Everything that can start motion stays locked until it has. Go to Jog and press Home.
Almost everything unavailable, only Wizards. There is no machine profile yet. Wizards walks you through making one.
Full explanation: The homing gate.
A program is loaded but the bed is empty
The toolpath is being drawn exactly where the program says it goes — outside the machine's working area. Either work zero is not where you assume, or the job does not fit this machine.
Do not press Start. See An empty bed with a file loaded.
The Safety button is red or amber
The pre-flight scan found something. Amber is a warning — a move close to a soft limit, or a rapid ending below the work surface. Red is a violation — a move outside the machine's travel, or deeper than the configured maximum cut depth.
The offending moves are coloured in the toolpath, so you can see where the problem is. Red does not stop you starting; it is telling you, not deciding for you. See The safety scan.
The machine is in ALARM
An alarm means the controller stopped because something was wrong: a limit switch was hit, a probe failed, or position was lost.
The spindle does not change speed
If your machine has a manual-dial router, spindle speed words in a program do nothing at all — you set RPM by hand on the router. Prime Motion says so during setup rather than pretending otherwise. Check the spindle entry in your machine profile.
A tool measurement happened that I did not ask for
Automatic tool measurement is switched on. It runs on Z zeroing and on every tool change, and it expects a fixed toolsetter to be fitted. If your machine has none, turn it off in Settings → Connection.
The Overrides control disappeared
It is deliberately withheld during a tool change or a tool measurement — a real-time override in the middle of a probing move is not safe. It returns when cutting resumes.
If you have never seen it, it is switched off in settings.
Nothing I do reaches the machine
Check, in order:
- Settings → Connection — does it report connected?
- Cable and power at the machine.
- Baud rate, if this is a first connection to an unusual controller.
A file will not import
"Unsupported type." Prime Motion accepts .nc, .gcode, .ngc, .ncp and .tap. Cloud folders show everything you have, so it is possible to pick something it cannot use — Select all only ticks files it can.
"Duplicate skipped." A file of that name is already in the project. The existing one was kept, deliberately: re-importing a folder after adding a few files is safe.
I have to sign in to Drive or Dropbox again
Access passes expire. Signing in again is normal and takes one tap — your password never reaches this app either time. See Files and storage.
The job stopped and I do not know how far it got
Look in History: every job leaves a record with how it ended, including ones that were cancelled, failed, or cut short by the app closing.
To continue one rather than just read about it, use Wizards → Job Recovery, which keeps the exact line and position — see Recovering an interrupted job.
Cut depth is wrong across the workpiece
If the surface is not flat, or the material is not sitting flat, a program cut to a single Z will be deep in some places and shallow in others. Probe a mesh height map and the program follows the real surface.
The simulation looked different from the cut
Two usual reasons:
- The tool geometry was missing. A program with no tool information falls back to a flat endmill in the preview, which removes material differently from a V-bit or a ball nose.
- The stock was derived, not declared. A hand-imported program has no stock information, so the preview shows a box around the toolpath rather than your actual material.