Worklog: TAIG CNC Mill

[zittware]

As I stated; I purchased an External USB 80GB HD during a blackfriday sale at compusa for $30 after rebate. While not strickly required for the mill; I felt it was necessary given the small size of the laptop's harddrive (1.6GB ). Here it is mounted inside the CNC controller box:

Right now the drive is mounted with a couple of applications of doublesticky foam tape. This is temporary until I get other projects out of the way and the CNC mill is functional enough for me to create some fancy mounting brackets with said mill.
The power cord for the usbhd runs under the plexi mounting plate and out the same hole as the 24V psu cable. The usb cable runs out one of the backpanel io card holes and is tyewrapped to the screw hole.

Each Stepper has approx 6ft of 4conductor 22gauge wire attached to it. I got this wire from homedepot for ~$6 (18ft at $0.26/ft). On the end of the stepper wire; there is a male molex connector and the wire driver end has the female mated end. This was done so I could disconnect the stepper drivers from the cnc box when/if I need to move it. 6ft is likely WAY overkill; (ie too long) but I wanted to give enough flexiblity when/if I need to move the laptop/box further away due to flying metal shavings.

The connectors I picked were easy to find... being from RatShack as 6pin power connectors. Necessary as this was a Sunday parts run and I didn't want to fight Fry's weekend crowds / mail order. RatShack Catalog#'s:
Male 274-226 <-- Stepper end
FeMale 274-236 <-- Driver end
I choose the 6pin edition instead of the 4pin to support later upgradeablity. IE if I decide to put limit switch or some other addition; I have two more connections I can make.

Wiring the steppers were easy... most of the colors matched the stepper motor's color... IE red, green, black. The only color which didn't match was white vs blue on the stepper. So it went like this:

Pin#- Signal - Stepper Side - Driver Side
1 - A - Green - Green
4 - A# - Black - Black
2 - B - Blue - White
5 - B# - Red - Red
3 - empty
6 - empty

[ỒĊBłůē]

Looking good there Zitt.

I'm liking the considerations you're throwing in there too - repositioning, upgrading and all

[fivecheebs]

Nice work man ... its getting exciting

[zittware]

Oh, BTW on Saturday - I got a 6ft db25 extention cable from a local store for $4.00. This was necessary to extend the existing LPT cable to the back of laptop.

Before hooking up the stepper motors; I had to adjust the VRef on each axis channel before continuing. This was done per the included instructions and the datasheet. Grounding the black lead to the 24V PSU's common side... I put the red (+) to TPX and adjusted PotX until it read 3.35V. This voltage was recommended by the included documentation.

I continued adjusting the other axis (y, Z) using it's associated Pot and Test point.

With that complete; I proceeded to connect the bare ends of the 6ft stepper cables to the proper axis terminal blocks. Before doing that I marked each cable with a tape "flag" with X, Y, Z so they could be easily identified later if it was ever dissembled. The other ends were also marked with X,Y,Z on the molex connectors themselves. Again, for easier assembly.

I put the cover back the new enclosure and attached the laptop to the LPT cable. Then I attached each stepper motor one at time to it's channel... Each time powering put the driver board - just encase one was "bad" or miswired. No magic smoke. No driver board destruction.

With each stepper connected; I proceeded to test the stepper/driver wiring with Xylotex's tester application. BTW: The standard LPT address is 378.

SUCCESS!!!!

And I have Video to prove it.
Warning! It's big at 4.2MB... but I'm sure that won't stop many of you:
Stepper motion via computer control

Featured in the video is me running the tester app above for each axis... followed by "jogging" each axis from within TurboCNC - the actual application which will be "driving" the mill.

One note is that I had to swap the Turbocnc's X & Y Axis pins as when I jogged X, Y's axis moved - unlike the tester app. I guess TurboCNC's Xylotex default INI file is out of date for v2 of the driver board? Next time I have the system connected to the wireless network; I'll try to upload a copy of my current ini file with the swapped axis.

That's about all I can do right now with the cnc electronics. The only thing I want to do is attach the chassis LED to the 24V supply to indicate externally that the driver board is receiving power.

But for now; I'll have to wait for the mill to arrive before I can do more physical work with the setup.

[fivecheebs]

Excellent

When does the mill arrive?

[zittware]

Originally Posted by fivecheebs

When does the mill arrive?

No specific date is known.
When I ordered; lead time was quoted @ 2-8wks.


Just got word from Nick who tells me that my mill has shipped an is in route!

I should have some initial impressions / pictures be the end of this upcomming weekend.

Now I must look around for some sample gcode to test the mill.

[fivecheebs]

Double

[Starbuck3733T]

+ + ?

edit: OMG the sound of the steppers is just tooooooo cool. Industro-gasm?

[zittware]

<--- will be spending time in the cold garage... cleaning / making room for the mill.

[MAOJC]

Ah my first post.

Nice start there zittware. I have been just where you are myself. Get ready to keep plonking money down for tooling.

Just as a bit of advise, you had better get a fan blowing on the Xylotex heatsinks to prevent overheating. At 3.35 vdc vref you start losing steps when it gets hot. 24vdc is a good place to start, and a bit more performance can be had by getting the voltage up to around 28VDC, but go no higher. Although the Xylotex is rated at 30VDC you will experience back emf, which is voltage generation from the motors on decelleration.

I just changed my setup over from TurboCNC to Mach3 ( http://www.artofcnc.ca/ ). It does require a bit more computing power than you are using now, I think the minimum recomended is a 1 Ghz machine. Its feature set is much greater than TurboCNC though. Mach3 contains many wizard type programs for quick GCODE generation for tasks like bolt patterns, circle cuts, engraving, pocket cutting and many more. There are lots of add-ons avaialble and many are free. A trial version is avaialble and will run upto 999 lines of GCODE without a license. The cost is very reasonable as well. I have no affilation with Mach3, I just think it is great software that is very well developed and matured.

Most of all have fun, CNC motion control is a blast.