Building a CNC in Las Colinas » Mill Progress

First (good) Sawdust

wjconrad — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:25:53 +0000

Today we got the T-track hold down system and our spoilboard setup. Now we actually have some good looking pictures to share. What you’re seeing the “RLD” part of HELLO WORLD, since we accidentally ran into the 500 line limit of the demo Mach3 and couldn’t finish it. We should have a more complete version later this week, and hopefully some video of cutting.

Yep, we're running

wjconrad — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:28:45 +0000

Last night we saw our first sawdust. There’s still a lot of tweaking and some additional work, but we managed to cut the letter “D” into a board of MDF and freehand a quick “Hi” into a piece of 2×4 we had around.
Pics:

X-Axis runs too!

wjconrad — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:39:13 +0000

Our X-axis is now running, and we’ve tuned it up a little bit for faster speeds. I think a working Z-axis is very plausible this weekend at the rate we’ve been working.

Moving Pictures

wjconrad — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:07:09 +0000

Alright I know we’ve been sort of slacking on posting our progress updates here, and I apologize. We’ve been so busy actually making progress we just haven’t had the time to sit around and write about it.

For instance, we’ve got two Youtube videos you should probably watch. Watch the videos, then click “More” and I’ll discuss them.

Alright how amazing is it that our Y axis is actually moving? We’ve also fully attached the X-Axis and we’re going to wire it up tonight. We could have two fully working axes by tomorrow.

I don’t know if we’re being overconfident, but we just ordered the Hitachi router needed to get us fully operational, and we had it overnight shipped so we will have it by tomorrow. Could we see sawdust by the end of this weekend? I don’t know yet but I am going to do my best to make it happen.

Controller Fans

wjconrad — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:02:10 +0000

Brian’s house is on the top of a hill, so he’s currently iced in and I can’t come help him, but he still managed to get some work done anyway. He just finished drilling out the holes for the 120MM fans we’re going to use to keep the controller and PC from overheating.
He used a 4 1/2 inch hole cutter bit for the fans and a 3/16th bit for the screw holes (#8 machine screws cut for length).

More technical details are on his blog: http://briansprojects.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/mill-controller-fans/ I’d feel like a bit of a plagiarist if I repeated his technical details here verbatim so go check it out if you’re interested in that.

Even More Controller Progress!

briandm81 — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:28:42 +0000

Tonight, after getting a late start, we managed to make a lot of progress. The stepper drivers are now soldered to the XLR connectors and the back of the drawer has been attached. The front of the drawer has been milled (using 3 different sizes of forstner bits) to accept the power and e-stop buttons. The power and e-stop button have been mounted in the front of the drawer and the front of the drawer has been attached. The sides have been temporarily put in place for photo purposes.

The remaining tasks are wiring up the PC power supply, fastening the mill power supply to the enclosure, drilling and mounting the inbound and outbound fans, and final enclosure assembly. Have a look:

More Controller Progress!

wjconrad — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:52:43 +0000

Sorry for the long hiatus everyone, but Brian’s been making ~20 drawers for his kitchen and we’ve been a little stuck. We weren’t sure how to mount the hard drive and power supply. Ordinarily, we’d use L brackets but we couldn’t find a big enough L bracket that would fit in the case. Yesterday, Brian had a brilliant idea of building a small tray to rest the powersupply above the hard drive. We bought a pretty large amount of standoffs from Tanner Electronics. (We both can’t say enough good things about Tanner Electronics, they’re one of the old school Mom and Pop electronics stores that still has a family atmosphere and stocks everything.)

E pur si muove! (And yet it moves)

wjconrad — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:46:55 +0000

Tonight, after 8 months of work, we finally witnessed a part of our mill move.

Since our last update we assembled the PC we’re going to use to control our mill and got the Mach3 software installed. Mach3 is the control software that sends signals out to the controller to move the motors. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get any motion out of our motors when we fed Mach3 the G-Code that is supposed to control the mill. Brian and I were pretty stumped.

We started asking around for troubleshooting tips on Joe’s CNC forum and we emailed PMDX support. PMDX support emailed me back today and told me to look at the “Outputs Enabled” status LED light on the side of the controller board. Ours wasn’t lighting up, so output wasn’t being passed to the motors. That indicated a fault in either the emergency stop or charge pump feature. As it turns out, we hadn’t disabled the charge pump jumper. Once we disabled the jumper, we fed Mach3 the G-Code “G0 X10″ which means “Move the X axis to position 10″ and our motor started spinning.

Heatsink Drilling and Tapping

briandm81 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:14:28 +0000

After much pain and suffering the heatsink for the steppers used to mount the break-out board has been drilled and tapped. My first attempt ended in failure last night following a failure of two tools (my drill-press and a brand new 6/32 tap set). This night went much better with a new piece of aluminum and a new tap set (this time a Craftsman from Sears). I built a template in Visio to drill the holes. I printed that template onto Legal paper, cut it out, taped it to the aluminum plate and proceeded to drill it out with the somewhat functional drill-press.

The process went much better the second time around. The piece of aluminum is .25″ x 3.75″ x 13″ and was purchased from Metal Supermarkets. For those of you in need of metal, this place is great (http://www.metalsupermarkets.com/). Not only did they machine the piece to the right size we needed, but they did it while Wayne waited. To top things off, they even replaced the piece that was ruined by a faulty tool (or possibly a faulty operator …me) for free! You can buy online or from one of their local locations.

As soon as I get the file section added to the blog, I will upload the Visio diagram (in PDF format) along with other documentation I have been using. I have a Micro ATX PDF as well that we will be using later in the process as we begin to get the controller completely assembled in the drawer. As always, here are some pictures.

The Controller

briandm81 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:12:04 +0000

It took us a while, but we are finally back to work on the mill. I had a few delays while I needed to do some work on the house, but now I have time again during the week to work on the mill. Last week and into the weekend we were able to get the power portion of the controller wired up. This evening I continued working and was able to get the break out board and power supply wire into the power. Next up, hooking up the stepper drivers and using Mach3 to test out the controller. Keep in mind that the pictures below are just for testing purposes, it will be wired a bit more cleanly before mounting all of this into the enclosure. Check out the pictures: