The "chatter" marks look worse than what I am familiar with for the direct-drive motors - how tall is that "M"? About an inch?

Have you tuned the Gecko's to get minimum motor resonance?

Gerald you may want to get that eye adjusted the M is 15/16" ;) You're covered this time cause you said "about".

I have not tuned the Gecko's yet. :o

My eye is metric, it judged it at 25mm, but the conversion to inches is not so good. (I use the word "about" very often because guys like you are checking me....:))

Mentioned the Gecko tuning in Doug's thread this week. Very simple to do.

And after we tuned the motors, it sure appeared to be smoother.

way to go on number 4!! Im shooting for somewhere between 40 and 400.

Found it. It's called CV setting (Constant Velocity). When used it tends to round corners a bit. Seems like I had to run the lathe with it turned off :confused:.

Did it soften the little bit of chatter? Or get rid of the "glitch" in the O?

Didn't set it yet, just remembered where it was.

Mounted and wired all 3 limit/home switches to 1 pp input. Next I need to add the bumpers for the switches, then I will post on how well (or not so well) they work.

I know everyone is wondering why it takes me so long to do things ..... it's cause it takes forever to get stuff custom made, example the ford blue ac cord going to the router. :-)

JR,
It would appear that your fabricated a replacement "hard machine stop" to mount the x axis switch on. Did you cut that from a section of Tee or add-on to an existing piece of angle iron?
Nice work - I will be interested to see how the homing sequence works with using only 1 input.
***Anxiously awaiting results for the North Carolina institute of advanced machine technology and specialty fabrication! :)

J.R.

What part of "banned" don't you understand? If you post another picture of a painted part with a mirror-like reflection and chrome plated bolt heads, I'm coming after you.:cool: What kind of guy polishes and waxes the bottom of his gantry tubes?

You guys are funny. I am just imagining you guys waxing your mechmates with baby diapers like people do with high end sports cars every Saturday morning. Don't you know that these routers are designed to make dust and a mess!? lol

Sean I cut some 3" channel in half then added a piece to create the T then welded it to the 5/8 X5/8. I'll take a better picture.

JR, the N.C.I.A.M.T.S.F is intriguing - please tell?

North Carolina Institute of Auspicious MechMate Technicians - Senior Fraternity? :)

Look at post 210.

Homing/limit switches all working on 1 pair of wires. Sean it's a beautiful thing when a plan comes together, they work per-fect. Just click "ref all" and Z will 0, then Y will 0, then X will 0. I wil post a video later.
Doug setup soft-limits they are unreal. You can head toward the end of the travel going 90 MPH with your eyes closed and like magic when it gets within +- 10" of 0 it ramps down to a controlled stop.

JR, can't wait for the video. Can we expect it by tomorrow :) I'm assuming you are using mach3, soft limits in there work like a charm, it's all I use on one of my smaller DIY routers. Also, how are you getting speeds of 90MPH out of your steppers? Does your machine launch into outer space when you get up to that IPM? :D

Yeah its got a HEMI

JR.
I tried like Heck to find that exact limit logic in the Mach3 support documentation now for months.
Thanks for being the guinea pig! If I wasn't so deep into a new child at home and traveling, I would be done by now :) Great work JR.
I can't wait for your Sundance festival video short story entry.
- Sean

Okay,
I just found the information in my printed copy of Mach3 Mill documentation, Page 11:

Home switches.

As you probably have noticed Mach3 is very flexible in its use of inputs and outputs. It is
possible to combine home and limit switches in many different ways but in this section of the
tutorial we will go thru how to set up one home switch for each axis, wired in series. As usual
we will not discuss the hardware and actual interface but it is assumed that the home switches
are normally closed, wired in series between ground and pin 10 on the parallel port.

To set up the home switches we need to enable the home inputs. In the Config menu select
Ports and Pins and go to the Input Signals tab. Enable the inputs X Home, Y Home and Z
Home and set the port # to 1 and pin # to 10 and check the Active Low setting on all three.

Here you can see the power of Mach3’s I/O capabilities. Even though we have three axis we
wire them in series and connect them to one input. When Mach3 homes the machine it will do
it one axis at the time and when the switch is hit it reverses the direction of the motor until the
switched is cleared and then it does the next axis. It is even possible to use same switch as
limit switch – Mach3 will know that the switch is a home switch when homing and from there
on it’s considered to be a limit switch.

Sean the switches are wired in series. Mach knows by the axis moving what home switch to set and it doesn't matter about the limit override, it stops everything.

Brian I'll do my best.

....lol, your quick and got back to me before I finished my edit!

J.R.

I finally have a warm weekend here to work on my machine so I hope to get the Y axis square with the X axis.

I'm waiting on you to fabricate your dust collection foot so please get busy on that next. I want to work on mine soon but I'm not posting any pictures until after you have.:)

Sean is that :cool: or what!!

Doug, master designer Marc Shlaes and I worked on the design a few months ago and will finish it next week.

I am constantly amazed at what I find that Mach3 can do for such a small price I paid for it. Software like this from Mitsubishi, Koyo, Baldor or others would be thousands of dollars.
Sometimes its good to be lucky!
...and yes, that is way COOL JR.

Hey, I got to the bottom of the last page of posts and forgot to check "next page". Now I see 10 more posts. . . . . .

You know what?.......I sense payback time is just around the corner. I could be collecting on that debt you guys are saying that you owe me :rolleyes: ........

I will be nagging you to teach me about Mach3 - what works, what doesn't work. I havn't actually driven one of these beasts to the limits of Mach3 and I'll be watching with keen interest. Maybe even nagging for some of your setup files ;)

Carry on chaps, I'll sit at the end of the bar....

"Carry on chaps, I'll sit at the end of the bar...."
left end or right ........... we'll slide you a beer.

X = 0.0

J.R.,

Are you and Marc planning on using 6" duct work or 4" in your DC system?

My existing dust system is 4", so I'll need to stay with that. The 13" planer puts out 10 times more chips than the router, so 4" on the router should be fine.

Still anxiously awaiting the video :)

J.R.

Are you using one or two limits for the gantry (i.e. at each x motor)?

I planning on using two so that the machine is auto squaring every time one zeros but that requires two inputs to the BOB. (one common for Z, Y and X1 and the second for X2)

Alan I used 1 limit switch on the gantry. I'm running both steppers with 2 geckos 1 bob signal.

I don't believe that is correct. Two inputs would be desirable but not necessary.

When homing a dual drive axis Mach does one side followed by the other.

So just as X, Y and Z can share an input so can X slave. (I believe)

They can be made to home simultaneously with a custom script but sequentially is the Mach default.

I realise if you have not seen this happen it probably sounds far fetched. Why would a slaved axis home sequentially?

But when you've seen a slaved axis home you'll say "Oh I see what you mean" :)

Greg

Greg, my slave drive does not know it is a slave. Drivers for X1 and X2 share the step and direction signal from the BOB.
With the switches all wired in 1 series loop Mach can only detect that some switch has tripped. If I was homing X and manually tripped the Z switch with my hand the machine would accept that as the X switch and zero the X dro.

Just some pics

JR

If you don't mind could you tell me the name/part no. of that switch and the name of the supplier. I am no where near ready for it, but, I will add it to my database so I'll have it when needed.
Thanks, Paul
PS: Keep posting pics. I love it when I log on and there are pictures to see.

A subsequent discussion on using limit switches to autosquare a gantry was moved here....

Paul I got them on e-bay, where else.:)

I just had the pleasure and priviledge of spending the last 10 days in J.R.'s shop where we learned to use his machine together. I also met Gene. What a wonderful community this MM group is.

For this adventure, I handled mostly the CAD and the CAM and J.R. handled Mach.

This was the first time I ever saw a CNC machine (of any kind) in action and it was extremely cool!

Gerald, consider this an electronic handshake / high five / pat on the back!

Together, J.R. and I engineered a dust collector setup that works beautifully. We also cut a combination vacuum plenum and spoilboard. I took some pictures and will post them as soon as I prepare them.

Doug / Sean (and others), I believe that our dust collector is very clean looking and probably easier to fabricate than with sheetmetal. We fashioned it out of .75in (19mm) expanded PVC and some 4in (100mm) PVC drain tube. The dust containment fingers around the bottom were fashioned from some heavy clear vinyl. I can post the dxf's and the Sheetcam jobs for the plenum and the dust foot if you are interested.

J.R.,

Thanks tons for that legendary southern hospitality. I learned a ton!

Marc