New Control Electronics Enclosure

[Bruce]

I added a VFD to my Carve King system and so with the extra electronics I had to expand my controls and the enclosure to house it all.
I was inspired by Mototech's clear acrylic enclosure and so I made mine out of .22" think clear acrylic.
Here's a couple quick videos.

 
 

[Derek the Admin]

Nice work on that. Sounded like she was about to take flight when you revved her up.

[Bruce]

Thanks, I still need to make a motor mount. I have the old Colt Router mount with shims stuck in the back holding the spindle motor right now.

[Mototech]

Pretty sweet, it does sound like a jet engine spooling up in the video😎 I've been thinking of making a dual router/ spindle mount to allow for easier tramming. Basically two mounts spaced apart to allow shims between the back of either the upper or lower mount to adjust the nod when tramming.

Honored to have been an inspiration for your electronics enclosure.

[Bruce]

Mototech, I didn't do the fancy etching since I have no experience working with acrylic. I wasn't going to make this the first project.

I've looked all over for an adjustable tramming base and the only one I could find was here. www.cncrouterparts.com/tramming-gmt-spindle-mount-p-360.html
But it looks like two mounting plates, a base and a tramming plate.  The tramming plate has an eccentric bearing nut for the Roll (turn on the Y axis left to right) and then shim can be placed between the tramming plate and the base plate for the pitch (turn on the X axis forward to back). May give you some ideas for something that would work for you.     

I think the Air cooled spindle motors are a bit noisy. I'm guessing the water cooled are quieter. But it is really cool having the spindle start up and shut down automatically.  I do have to add a G4 P5 command to dwell (delay) for 5 seconds so the spindle can ramp up to speed if I go all the way to 24000 rpm.  I need to play with the ramp time within the VFD to see how fast I can get it to go. 

[drakor]

why did you use 220 volt? and where did it connect on the uno board?

[jennamike]

what are the pros and cons of bCNC vs UGS

[Bruce]

Dec 16, 2018 2:03:07 GMT drakor said:

why did you use 220 volt? and where did it connect on the uno board?

The motor is a 3 phase 220 volt motor.  You can use a 120v input VFD but it will be derated because it has to work harder to output the 220V output.  I like the transformer on the front of the VFD to add electrical isolation and reduce harmonic electrical noise on the main power line.

The Arduino doesn't use 220 volts, it is only for the VFD/spindle power.  The Arduino/CNC Shield uses 24vdv power supply and 5vdc control signals. 

[Bruce]

Dec 24, 2018 3:55:07 GMT jennamike said:

what are the pros and cons of bCNC vs UGS

I like bCNC because it runs a bit more stable, from my experience, and it has a few more built in functions that I like.

Pros:
This is just a few I like. Check out link for more information: github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC

-fast g-code sender (works nicely on RPi and old hardware)
-simple probing

-center finder with a probing ring

-auto leveling, Z-probing and auto leveling by altering the g-code during sending (or permanently auto-leveling the g-code file).

--Various Tools:

--basic CAM features (profiling, pocketing, drilling, flat/helical/ramp cutting, thread milling, cutout tabs, drag knife)

--User g-code plugins:

---bowl generator

---finger joint box generator

G-Code editor and display
with graphical display of the g-code, and workspace.

Cons:
It is a bit more cumbersome to install and setup.  It uses Python with additional packages that need to be installed manually.
-tkinter the graphical toolkit for python Depending your python/OS it can either be already installed, or under the names tkinter, python-tkinter, python-tk

-pyserial or under the name python-serial, python-pyserial for serial communication.

-numpy is a library for the Python programming language, adding support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a large collection of high-level mathematical functions to operate on these arrays.