ThePog

Man I am fizzing over this thing. I surfaced the table over the weekend so I had a decent base to work with. There was some dumbfuckery with the length of the cut surface as it was 40mm or so too short. It turned out my calibration was just wrong, what a dick. After I sorted that I then I realised that the odd misalignment at one of the corners of the bed was not a poorly cut bit of laminex, it was the belts moving at different rates due to different stretch. I sorted that tonight and then started cutting the vac table. I'm breaking it out into small operations so I can learn some shit about feeds. This is the vac inlet pockets; Come up good, those screw holes were routed too... I also set up spindle cooling as I didn't want to toast it, I bought some tube from mitre 10 and went redneck on it; This will get tidied up and made to run automatically a bit later.

Fuck yes

Sweet. I have kind of been thinking about buying one of those RC trucks with the proper detailed axles and making a replica pogmobile for lols...

I finally got the spindle running, as expected it was me being a dumbass about the VFD setup parameters. Although for some reason it is only getting speed control from the potentiometer on the VFD. I am ok with this though as it will allow me to experiment with speeds and feeds. I also trammed the spindle to cut straight and flat, good enough to be able to face the table anyways. I also did a hard out calibration of the X and Y axis so it would cut accurately. I also made up a longer control cable for the big servo, that was stressful. This means everything is nicely tucked away in the cable trays now. Next is to buy a cutter and face that table... Then I'll design a vac table and make it. After that it's all cash money.

Yea it might be that if I fail to get Linux to drive it. Theoretically it is straightforward but I am a nooooooooob.

Fuck I'm cranking this shit out. I set up all the prox switches and spent yesterday crashing things into them while trying to get my head around the LinuxCNC .ini file that controls all that stuff. Pretty much got it sorted but I really need to understand how the soft limits work a bit better. Then I sat down and dicked with HSMXpress which is a cam add in for Solidworks that seems to mostly do what I need it too. Shit it's a steep learning curve, I needed a few revisions of the setup to get the router to do anything sensible. I need to spend a lot more time learning about G code as well. However I did get a basic functional setup working, and here it is; Fucked with the spindle but I can't get it to go, probably a setup thing in the LinuxCNC .hal file which I also need to spend a lot of time learning about.

Probably, although he seemed like one of those dudes that just likes helping out. He'll get a gobbie if he asks tho

A bit of a win today. I have been looking for bits of MDF at least 3m x 1.4m so I can have a bed with no joins in it, this was proving difficult and/or stupidly expensive. Then I remembered a place next to where I got some electroplating done that had stacks of random MDF sheets lying around. I rocked up yesterday and told the the man what I was doing and what I wanted, he was super interested and said he would sort it out. I got a call today saying the sheet was ready, so I swung by to pick it up. He had cut 2 sheets of 18mm to the exact dimensions I wanted and sold them to me for only $50, what a GC. I just slammed one on now, looks sweet. I have also been setting up some cable routing and the prox switches, just the Z axis to go;

Do you want me to check to see if that pulley on the front of my engine will unbolt?

Yea I thought I would have a look to see if it would solve your problem, but it's probably a bit weird for that.

I took a pic of the pulley on the front of the 2y, it was a multi V and a single V which is weird.

Challenge accepted.

And fuck it, let's add the Z axis. Also I spent some hours learning how to set up the vfd/spindle. This should be good to go as soon as I find some four core cable for it.

Thought I would get cheeky and get it to follow a path. Z axis is not hooked up as the cable to the stepper is too short and I was scared it might zoom off somewhere before I hit the e stop. Also I set it up for very small movements because I have no limit switches setup yet. Still, much excitement.

Been chunking away at this, tidied up a whole lot of little stuff like making the belts run true etc. Also I fudged together two different types of cable chain that came in the rando servo kit to make a run long enough for the long (X?) axis. Not super pretty but it will work. I will still need to buy some more for the short (Y?) axis Today I made a table for the screen etc and mounted the estop to it, looks sweet and mostly swings out of the way when not being used. I have ordered many proximity switches, apparently you can series the switches on only one input and LinuxCNC has a procedure that will home it automatically with that setup, for a while I thought I would be using all of my inputs for homing sensors. This is good, I will have 3 spare for.... things.