ThePogs Homebrew CNC Router Build

[ThePog]

Righto, I have been setting up the control box, I just have a couple of questions for my man once he is around.

Unless any of you peeps know all about Viking machinery break out board IO connections...?

 

I spent some time pricing up linear rails which was sobering, I was such a twat not to grab that stuff off TradeMe when it came up, however I have dropped almost my entire tax return on some Hiwin stuff out of Taiwan, basically half the price of nsk stuff here. Shit I hope it arrives and is worth it.

[ThePog]

Now I have the motors all running correctly with LinuxCNC, very excited...

Edit, maybe I should move this to other projects...

[ThePog]

A lovely mod moved this over from the tech thread, I figured it might be interested for some peeps to see the progress/fail.

 

Anyway, look at this poos.

 

It took a wee while to get to this situation, as I was looking at the pins on the breakout board like a mech eng, I assumed the line of inputs would start at 1, but naturally it started at 2, so all my control wires were in the wrong holes. 

This was an easy fix.

There were other issues though, one of the built in tools with LinuxCNC is something to check the latency of the pc. This was showing a latency of 309000ns, which was about 6x outside the possible input range of the setup program. It ran but the control prog was throwing errors.

So tonight I installed LinuxCNC on another wee pc I had, this had a much better figure of around 29000ns, everything runs pretty smooth now.

LinuxCNC is pretty sweet, the install and setup is really straightforward once you get your head around.

The actual build should start in the next week or so...

[anglia4]

Is your man James from Viking Machinery?

[ThePog]

2 minutes ago, anglia4 said:

Is your man James from Viking Machinery?

I got the breakout board from him, but no its a chap in NP called Andrew who sells tooling and does CNC machining as well. You probably know him, NP being such a wee hole.

[anglia4]

Nah don’t know Andrew. But James is one of my uni mates

[ThePog]

This just arrived, looks pretty legit;

[ThePog]

And some more shit turned up;

[JoKer]

I'm actually following with interest as my Screen decided not to display anything Last week & the only guy I knew happened to have a second hand display lying about

turns out it was 1 year older (1994) and its circuit board seemed equally 'warm' in patches so not sure how long it will last

teach me to hang onto old tech eh (has a 9 pin display cord @sentra may have a solution Plan B I'll test next week with the help of @SEEN88 and see if we can refurb old unit too (thats plan C

[ThePog]

Just now, JoKer said:

I'm actually following with interest as my Screen decided not to display anything Last week & the only guy I knew happened to have a second hand display lying about

turns out it was 1 year older (1994) and its circuit board seemed equally 'warm' in patches so not sure how long it will last

teach me to hang onto old tech eh (has a 9 pin display cord @sentra may have a solution Plan B I'll test next week with the help of @SEEN88 and see if we can refurb old unit too (thats plan C

There is a Facebook group dedicated to retrofitting CNC stuff with new driving kit;

Commercial CNC retrofitters

There may be something there.

Tbh setting up LinuxCNC to run the servos was absolutely trivial, I would be looking for control pinouts for the drivers, mine have 3 wires plugging into a parallel port on the driver box, earth/pulse/direction, they go to a $30 breakout board that plugs into a pentium 4 pc, shit runs easy as.

 

[ThePog]

This isn't cranking along as fast as I want, so much other shit is getting in the way.

I have also done some redesign on the table, I'm thinking of using T slot to mount the rails. This will save some hole drilling and allow for much easier adjustment.

However bits are slowly trickling in, a 2.2Kw water cooled spindle and VFD;

[ThePog]

Went hard today.

 

[flyingbrick]

Looks great! How do you adjust table flatness?..or is it perfect right now and so rigid it will never move?

[ThePog]

Just now, flyingbrick said:

Looks great! How do you adjust table flatness?..or is it perfect right now and so rigid it will never move?

Its pretty flat as I took a bit of care, plus it is quite rigid. However i am expecting some sag in the middle/general flex. I have some turnbuckle type things that i can winch it closer if it needs it.

I will probably need some rigid feet and a way to set it up perfectly level. I guess it depends how much tolerance I am going to need.

All of the real set up adjustment will come from the 8040 extrusions that I will mount on the angle. These will be able to be adjusted for width, plus I can shim them up if needed. The linear rails will be mounted on those so will probably provide all the vertical adjustment.

I intend to make a vac table as well so I imagine I will be able to machine this in place, including surfacing it.

So it will all go super easy.

 

 

 

 

 

Probaby.

[ThePog]

When I sight across it it looks pretty good;

 

[flyingbrick]

man that is super impressive.

 

[anglia4]

Did you only weld the verticals so it stays flat?

[ThePog]

Just now, anglia4 said:

Did you only weld the verticals so it stays flat?

You got it.

[KP_wag]

So what rides on the ali extrusions? I've been looking to build a router sled for surfacing slabs, full manual style and fancy linear bearings obviously way overkill but looking for a rail solution that is better than the all MDF projects that are all over the internet...

[ThePog]

21 minutes ago, KP_wag said:

So what rides on the ali extrusions? I've been looking to build a router sled for surfacing slabs, full manual style and fancy linear bearings obviously way overkill but looking for a rail solution that is better than the all MDF projects that are all over the internet...

I have some Hiwin linear rails that will bolt to the extrusion, but you can get rollers that will run directly on that style of ally. I did look at buying a small router kit that does it this way;

https://ooznest.co.uk/product/workbee-cnc-full-kit/#size-colour?gclid=Cj0KCQjwpNr4BRDYARIsAADIx9yse-dEa-M6DJXPbValUmQhXjAzt5aS71BqW7pplXWOxAIFuNXeWKwaAlvIEALw_wcB

AliX has many ripoffs of this design, the best ones seem to be BoxMan. Those rollers and the extrusion are on TM as well but for $$.

What sort of area do you want to cover?