Thread: Men's Shed Router

Take a look at Fusion360 from Autodesk. Free for none commercial use and includes an excellent CAM program.
For grbl, check out grbl controller, better (I think) than ugcs.

You might want to talk to CamBam, my local hackerspace got a free or reduced price license from them.

Hand coding fairly simple geometric shapes is OK but you really need a CAM program.

Vectric Cut2D would be my choice for your situation. Take a look at the free trial.

LinuxCNC is free and very capable control software. Can be run initially from a DVD.

It tends to be complex to set up for the more advanced features, but for basic three axis control is not so bad.

meshcam is pretty cheap too, and I believe they do a free trial.

MeshCAM - CNC Software - CAD/CAM Software

Another one mentioned quite a bit on the X-Carve forums is Estlcam. Not free but pretty cheap ($US50 I think)
Works with grbl

Guys, thanks for all the suggestions, I will follow up on all of them.

Today's effort added an extra cooling fan and unearthed a dependence on which USB socket on the laptop we used.
One socket would communicate with the Arduino, but not handshake with a jog command, the other is Ok.

We now have a couple of G-Code manuals with the machine, one specific to the Shapeoko version used on this Arduino/Grbl combination.
We all have homework to do.

Now to resolve the scaling factors.
John

my initial guess is that your laptop has a mix of type 2 and type 3 USB ports, and one type doesn't want to play

The router did its first air cuts yesterday, much handshaking and photo taking, we instantly had a crowd gathered around the machine.

The job was the letter "L" in a back square using G-Code produced on CamBam by one of our members with some skills in CAD.

The interesting thing (to me) was that the job contained 583 lines, obviously way more than what would be practicable with hand coding.

Now to put in the platen, check squareness, tightness and flatness, and then put a cutter in the spindle for a real test.

My next job is to install some representative CAM programs as suggested above, for me to trial at home.

I promise a photo of the first cut will be included in the next post.
John

one piece of software worth checking out for the transfering g-code to the machine step is chilipeppr. Its browser based (I don't get why people would even think about doing this), but there is an offline version available which works very well. I believe they have a workspace available for a grbl based controller.

Originally Posted by electrosteam

My next job is to install some representative CAM programs as suggested above, for me to trial at home.

If you trial any of the Vectric software, make sure you avail yourself of the many excellent training videos.

They really are one of the best for support materials.

Well, still no photo.
When we tried the limit switches, no stopping it.
Then:
- a lot of examining and checking of wiring,
- the wiring diagram shows NC switches in parallel,
- checking of switches to ensure they are NO and the drawing wrong,
- find a document stating Pins 9, 10, 11 as the Arduino digital inputs for limit switches.
- cursing of the way the Arduino is stacked at the bottom and the small box the unit is in,
- counting of pins and measurement of voltages as limit switches operated,
- discover the digital inputs are numbered from 0, not 1, so the pin numbering is out by 1,
- cursing new designers unaware of 50 years of digital design and numbering of pins and ports,
- decision that something is wrong with the Arduino/Grbl software,
- then the router has no power,
- resetting of circuit breakers at the distribution board,
- still no power, the 24 V power supply is dead !

Cowered and beaten we retire.

A review at home of documents reveals the Grbl has a parameter list with one parameter listed as a boolean for 'Hard Limits', probably just needs resetting.

The power supply has blown the input fuse and one of the front NPN high voltage transistors displaying a smoke trail.
The errant D13009K device is China unique, but probably available.
Local ebay prices what looks like an identical power supply with free postage from Sydney for $36.

John.

The power supply was $37 and delivered to my door 2 days after ordering, from Chester Hill.
The appropriate parameter was set =1 and now the limit switches work.
All stepper motors reduced to about 0.5 amps per winding as I think the original supply was probably overloaded.
Discovered the current adjustment controls on the stepper PCB operate in opposite direction to that stated in the instructions.

Next week we will measure the power supply current and install the platen.
John

Hi John

Not sure what type of stepper driver you are using but most are current chopping drives and its best to have the highest voltage the drive can take (not the constant voltage rating of the stepper) It should also be a very basic unregulated power supply not a switchmode. The reason for this is that you will be able to drive the motors much faster (has to do with the current rise time thru an inductor) and also the basic unregukated supply can handle the fluctuations much better.

Definitely keep separate your high current power supply needs from you 24vdc signal lines ....noise, safety etc.

BTW very cool your doing this at a Men's shed.

Mark

Thanks for the comments Mark.

Yesterday was another interesting few hours.
Reported that last week a simple outline was drawn using a marker pen, so we are progressing.

Our platen is now in place.
Firstly we measured the load on the 24 Vdc supply to the steppers, still low.
But the stepper shield chips are still getting very hot.

We had motion, but only some of the limit switches were working, sometimes, with odd voltage transitions at the switches.

Renewed the cursing related to access and discovered odd voltage transitions at the Arduino pins.

After much investigation we discovered a ground pin had not been soldered to a PCB, and one of the pins had missed its mating socket.
Then the Z limits ceased working altogether, appears to be a wiring fault.
More mutterings as I pointed out the negative side of bringing wiring in to the cabinet to a group soldered junction without a terminal strip.
We may have to break the soldered connections apart and trace the wiring.

John

Hi John,
I recently built an x carve controlled by a free program called Easel. This is provided by a company called Inventables in the US. It is not powerful like Fusion 360, but is simple to use and includes CAD and CAM packages which should work with Arduino and G code. It is online meaning that design can be on one computer and control from another. I've found it works best in google chrome. SVG files can be downloaded to it. I use vector magic to convert jpg files to svg and have had quite a bit of success using this method. Give it a go. https://www.inventables.com/technologies/easel