Monday 16 January 2017

Milling Madness

The end is in sight. I got some more work done on the Mill upgrade over the weekend and am now at a point where I am happy to start making chips.

Last time I tried to get some work done on the mill I was defeated trying to get a fan set up. This time I found a fan in my junk pile that works.
This is the old power supply that I installed in the control box here. Then I replaced it here. Although it has been sitting for over a year the fan still works from it. It is labelled as a brushless fan but I figured that the designers wouldn't have gone to the trouble to drive the fan with some kind of waveform and it could be driven with plain DC.

It turns out my guess was correct. So I now have a fan to go in the case. It was even exactly the right size for the mounting holes.

Here it is set up in the black box testing phase. I had it rigged up on the desk without plugging in the machine just to get this stuff sorted. Now that I have the fan and everything sorted it is time to move it off the desk onto it's home on the CNC bench.
Here you can even see the penguin power. I am planning on using just the mouse and the little numpad pendant as the interface for this as there won't be much call to type stuff in and this will keep the fairly crowded bench clearer. For now however while I am setting up the parameters for the stepper motors as a proper keyboard makes this much easier.

Now I just need to work out the toolchain to turn a CAD drawing into code to run on this machine. Getting it onto the machine should be fairly easy as it runs a quite up to date version of Linux so I can just set up an NFS share or similar for loading up programs.

Cheers,
Rex

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