It's taken me almost 4 hours, but I've attached my EEEBox XP PC, monitor and PSU to my build assembly. No end of axis sensors wired or fitted yet, that can be another day. I have some reasonably heavy MDF attached, and it seems to be moving freely on the M6 and M8 threads. The Y axis still needs to be connected, it's the only floating one. X and Z are fixed motors, and have fixed wiring looms. Z is not yet used.
I have the stepper axis calculations back running on alternate interrupts, as I think excessively high frequency resetting of the PWM was preventing cycle completions from occuring.
It occurred to me today that I could run a "lawn mowing" operation with a router bit and some X & Y stepper excercises, and clean myself a perfectly flat platform if required.
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It's another day (the next), and after a family outing, I set to work... Being a custom design, things don't just clip together ! So I've spent a fair bit of the day figuring out how to attach things. I made up 4 leads for the 4 axis, with three terminal plugs on one end, and opto interupters on the other, then I attached an X axis and Y axis one, with double end of travel vanes. Because I've attached an EEEBox, I wanted a way to attach a keyboard and mouse too, but in the end I settled for a sort of detachable drawer that can be moved when the machine is in motion so as not to restrict it's movement.
ReplyDeleteThis day has been a cracker, about the second hot spring day, so I did all my work outside. Now it's getting dark, I'm back into the S/W, I want to detect the limits, zero the axis affected assuming it's a homing run in the correct direction (else it's a sign something's gone badly wrong), and start implementing G-codes, with some maths to compensate for arbitarily different axis step sizes.
Curiously, the two wood mounted stepper motors are near silent, and the steel turret mounted motor is very noisy. I may end up remounting it on rubber pads, else I'm going to be unpopular at sleeping times !