Buildlog.Net Blog

Coasty Update

Here is a quick update on Coasty. Several people have asked if I am releasing the source files or selling a kit. I am adjusting the design to make that more viable.  The original version was made with parts I had laying about and not necessarily the best design choices for an open source project.

X Axis.

Originally I used an TR8-8 ACME thread lead screw. It was mounted to the motor by drilling a hole in the lead screw and epoxying it to the motor shaft. This worked well, but you needed a lathe to drill the hole and a special low backlash nut. The axis was also a little loud with and all metal design.

I changed to use a GT2 open belt cut to length.  Belts and pulley are really easy to get and don’t cost too much.

Electronics

Need to shorten some wires after testing.

There were some issues with the EleksMaker electronics that I did not like. The laser circuit did not appear to have a pull down on the signal and it tended to fire if the Arduino was not pulling it low. This would happen during reboot and other scary times. The wiring was also quite a pain. There were no connectors for the limit switches so you had to directly solder to the Arduino Nano.

I changed to use a custom PCB that is the entire rear panel. This contains all of the circuits including the limit switches. Building a Coasty was a little like building a ship in a bottle. Now the bottle has no bottom and there are less parts inside.

Front Door.

The front door now has a window. This makes the machine more fun to watch and no glasses are required.

Next Steps.

I have one build and am testing it for a while. If all goes well, I will release the source files and consider a kit.

X-Controller-Controller (X-Controller minus controller)

I am very happy with the X-Controller.  It packs everything you need to run Grbl into a clean little package.  It is super easy to hook up and move between machines. With that said, I had a quite a bit different idea in mind when I began the design.

The X-Controller was designed to be the motion controller for the X-Carve. The “X” in X-Carve was meant to signify that it was sold through a configurator and there were a lot of options. The X-controller was going to follow the same concept. It would support Grbl, Beaglebone Machinekit, Smoothy, and others. Additionally, alternate stepper driver PCBs might be developed.

To enable the configurability, the stepper driver section would be separated from the controller section. Every feature the stepper drivers supported would be available to the controller. The plug in controller PCB would control the features via firmware or jumpers and pots, depending on the power of the controller. The current X-controller has 4 stepper drivers, but (2) are wired together. In the split concept the controller card would decide how that was done.

At the time Easel was starting to get some real traction and Easel only supports the Grbl protocol. We decided that it was best to pick the easiest solution for our customers and make the X-Controller Grbl only.

My experiments in Beaglebone and PSoC have been such tangled messes of wires. I always wished I had that disconnected stepper PCB. I finally decided to make one.

The XCC Stepper Driver PCB uses the same Toshiba TB6600 drivers as the X-Controller. It fits in the X-controller just like a stock PCB, but it is quite a bit shorter.  The interface side of the PCB has (1) 2×5 right angle header connector for each axis. Brought out the the connector are…

• Step
• Direction
• Torque  (high=full current, low=1/3 current)
• Enable
• Micro-stepping selection
• VRef (sets the motor current)
• Ground and VMot

For this version, I put a current selection pot and micro step selection jumpers for each axis to simply testing.  These function should be on the controller board, so most of these will be built without those installed.   The PCB also needs 12VDC to 40VDC power for the motors.  Each driver has a small 5VDC supply built in, so an external source is not needed.

Here is a snapshot of the schematic.  This is just 1 of the 4 identical sections.

Here is snapshot of the layout. I was able to get everything on 2 layers.

It fits into the X-Controller great.  I used a small piece of black acrylic to fit the gap due to the shorter length.  It is working perfectly.  I have been testing it with my PSoC port manually wired in.  A PSoC5 controller will probably be the first controller card I will have made.

Yet Another Way to do the Kinematics

Paul Kaplan, originator of the Easel project, came up with another way to do the kinematics for the Line-us Clone. My method used intersecting circles. His method uses the Law of Cosines.

The Law of Cosines relates the lengths of the sides of a triangle to the cosine of one of its angles.

This can be used to find the angles of the servo arms.

(Click on the images if you want a larger view)

The Goal

The goal is to find the two angles, A1 and A2, of the servo arms

Known Values

• Px is the desired X location of the pen
• Py is the desired Y location of the pen
• L1 is the length of the upper servo arm (50mm)
• L2 is the length of the end of the Pen Arm (50mm)

Step 1

Find the distance “D” of the pen to hub using the Pythagorean Theroem and the angle T1 using arctangent.

Px² + Py² = D²

rewritten … D = Sqrt(Px² + Py²)

T1 can be found using the arctangent or inverse tangent formula. Note: When programming use the atan2(x,y) function to preserve the quadtrant.

T1 = atan2(Py,Px)

Step 2

Find T2 using the Law of Cosines

L1² + D² – L2² = 2 * L1 * D *cos(T2)

rewritten …  T2 = acos( (L1² + D² – L2²) / (2 * L1 * D))

Step 3

Find T3 using the Law of Cosines. We want the left one of the two T3 angles, but since the linkages form a parallelogram that same angle shows occurs in several places.  We will use the right one and the dimensions associated with it.

L1² + L2² – D² = 2 * L1 * L3 * cos(T3)

rewritten … T3 = acos( (L1² + L2² – D²) / (2 * L1 * L2))

Step 4

Determine A1 and A2 from the angles we figured out.

A1 = T1 + T2

A2 = A1 + T3

Conclusion

I think I will switch the code to use this method. I think I can optimize it better in C code. The speed of the code is important.  The faster it runs, the most times per second we can run it.  The more often we run it, the smoother it will run.

Line-us Clone Controlled by Easel and Grbl

Last week I made a Line-us drawing robot clone.  Unfortunately I had no good way to make it draw easily.  I thought I would give the CNC toolpath a shot.  My goal is to have a super portable thing to generate conversation at meetups. If I used Easel it would allow anyone with a web connection to easily make something.

Grbl

The most compact machine controller is Grbl and I have a lot of experience with it.  Grbl is designed to send step and direction signals to stepper motors.  The draw ‘bot uses hobby servos.  The nice thing about hobby servos is they don’t need to be homed.  They have feedback to tell them where they are. They also don’t care about speed, acceleration or steps/mm.  They just go wherever you tell them as fast as they can go. It occurred to me, the easiest way to hack this into Grbl was to not modify the Grbl code at all.  I would let Grbl think it is using stepper motors.  I would just add some extra code that runs on regular interval to tell the hobby servos where the stepper motors are in 3D space and they would be told to go there.  I played around with some intervals and 8 times per second (8Hz) seemed to work pretty well.  The ‘bot uses machine coordinates. The work coordinates are offset to the left because the ‘bot cannot draw at 0,0.  The pen would crash into the frame.

PSoC

I recently port Grbl to PSoC. I used (3) 16bit PWM components to control the hobby servos.  See this blog post on how I did that.  I then attached a 8Hz clock signal to an interrupt.  The interrupt sets a flag when it is time to update the servos.  When the main code sees this flag it does the calculations and and sets the PWM values.  Keeping the code out of the interrupts gets Grbl happier.

Easel

Easel is already setup to use Grbl.  You can either import gcode or create a design right in Easel.  I started out with importing gcode because the Benchy design was not in a format I could import. I created a template that shows the allowable work area. This will allow anyone to quickly create a drawing.

2D Benchy

I wanted to have a little fun with the first print.  “Hello World” was not good enough.  3D printers use benchmark prints, so I thought I would do a 2D version of the classic 3DBenchy.  To get a 2D drawing of 3DBenchy, I traced over an image with the line tool in CorelDRAW.  I then exported a DXF of that.

PSoC 5 Port Of the Grbl 1.1 CNC Controller

Image from Cypress

Grbl

Grbl is a high performance CNC controller.  It is used on a lot of small scale CNC machines and is the motion control code behind a lot of 3D printers.  It was originally targeted at the Arduino 328p hardware (UNO). It is developed  by Sungeun “Sonny” Jeon. He is a good friend.  He is always very helpful and this port would not have been possible without the quality of his code and his advice.

PSoC Mixed Signal Controller

I love working with the PSoC (Programmable System on Chip) family of micro controllers.  You can configure them on the fly with many analog and digital components.  The analog components are not basic ADCs and DACs, you have OpAmps, PGAs,  filters, MUXs and more.  The digital blocks includes basic logic gates, all the way up to FPGA like components you program yourself in Verilog..  There are over 200 ready to use components you can wire together on the chip.

I have always used them for small prototype projects, but wanted to test my skills by porting a major project like Grbl.  At the same time I wanted to take advantage of the features of the PSoC. The dev board I used was the CY8CKIT-059.  This has ARM Cortex M3 processor a lot of I/O and costs less than $10! It has a built in programmer and debugger.

PSoC Advantages

Here is a comparison between the the ATMega 328p (Arduino UNO) and the PSOC5

Flexibility

Grbl’s flexibility allows you to tailor it to your hardware.  With a few limitations, you can move the pins around and change things like whether switches are active low or high.  This is all done using #define values in configuration files.  That is great, but the code gets a little messy every time you access hardware. It has to do a little logic gymnastics each time.

With PSoC you can do all of that in a visual schematic and pin wiring feature.  Here is a PDF of my schematic.  Have you ever swapped transmit and receive on a UART? In PSoC you can just swap the pins on the schematic.

Here is an example of the difference in firmware code.

Grbl on 328p

uint8_t limits_get_state()
{
 uint8_t limit_state = 0;
 uint8_t pin = (LIMIT_PIN & LIMIT_MASK);

 if (bit_isfalse(settings.flags,BITFLAG_INVERT_LIMIT_PINS)) { pin ^= LIMIT_MASK; }

 if (pin) {  
   uint8_t idx;
   for (idx=0; idx<N_AXIS; idx++) {
     if (pin & get_limit_pin_mask(idx)) { limit_state |= (1 << idx); }
   }
 }
 return(limit_state);
}

Grbl on PSoC

uint8_t limits_get_state(){  
 return Status_Limit_Read();
}

Special Hardware Usage

I used some special features to move functions out of code and onto the hardware.  One of them was the step pulse.  Stepper drivers typically require a pulse of a minimum length to take a step.  In normal hardware you have to raise the pin, then figure out a way to turn it off after a given period of time.  This is typically done via an interrupt.  It works fine, but the code is messy and interrupts can cause timing issues.  PSoC  control registers have a pulse feature that automates this. You attach a clock and the clock determines the length of the pulse.  The code sets it and the hardware clears it.  It looks like this on the schematic.

Another feature I used was hardware switch debouncing.  This can be done completely in hardware.  See the image below.  The clock sets the debounce time.  The debouncers are all fed into a status register where they are read  as a single value.  There are digital “nots” after the debouncers because my switches close to ground.  The firmware could invert the logic, but it is so much easier to read on the schematic. It then feeds an interrupt.

If you would rather do this with an analog filter, you can design custom filters in the hardware.  You could fine tune the filter right from your keyboard.

 LCD

PSoC has a built in character LCD Component that makes using and LCD  very easy.  The code for the LCD is in the main loop and not an interrupt.  This allows the time critical  stuff to have higher priority.  I used an interrupt to just set a flag so the LCD does not update every time through the main loop.  I found the LCD to be an awesome debugging tool.  I could display stuff while the code is running.

I also used a hardware Quadrature Decoder for the LCD rotary knob. This works great to monitor the encoder in hardware.  I just need to read the value in the LCD update routine.  The clock feature on the QuadDec is a debouncer, which helped debounce my mechanical encoder.

Next Steps

I have been testing for a while and so far it is working great. I also have some plans to use the extra power on some cool projects.

Here is the code on GitHub

Here is a picture of my test setup.

A Line-us Clone

I have been going to the monthly Amp Hour, Hardware Happy Hour meetup.  A lot of people bring something to show.  My projects are too big.  Also, you need to bring your own power.  The meetup standard seems to be running off a USB cord. I was brainstorming ideas, when I saw the Line-us project on Kickstarter. It looked like the perfect size and power. I also love the challenge of non linear kinematics.

I decided to make a clone of it.  I started by importing one if their drawings into CorelDRAW and scaling it up to 1:1.  I then added some measurements.  I rounded them up to 80mm for the pen arm and 30mm and 50mm for the linkages.

I looked into hobby servos and found that the “mini” size looked about right.  I ordered 4 of them from Amazon.  I made sure to get metal output shafts because I thought I might have to press them into the 3D printed arms.

Design

I created a basic design in PTC CREO.  I added a lot of construction sketches for the linkages to help me with the kinematics later.  I downloaded a model of the servo from GrabCAD  to use while I waited the delivery.

I used 3mm bearings for all the joints.  These are pressed into the linkages.  This would allow me to firmly tighten the joints and not have to worry about slop in the joints.

Assembly

When the servos arrived, there were slight differences in from the model.  The mounting holes we much smaller at about 2mm.  I had to reprint with some changes.

My concept was to press the arms onto the servo shafts.  This sort of worked, but after a few crashes, they loosened up.  I ended up using a drop of thick super glue to secure them.  They were able to stall the motor without slipping.  It is important to mount the arms at the precise angle.  I made an Arduino sketch to hold the servo in the precise position while attaching the arms at the angle I wanted.  Each servo has a 180° travel.  The upper arm travels from 135° to negative 45°.  The lower arm travels from 45° to 225°.

Kinematics

In order make the pen go where you want it to go, you have to figure out what angle to set the arms. This is not a simple linear equation. You have to solve a multi-step geometry problem for each new location. I’ll walk you through the basic process. I placed the axis of the two servos at XY 0,0 to simplify things. You know the desired Pen Tip location, so start working back towards the cranks.

• Step1: Find the Pen A point. You know the lengths of the linkages between the 0,0 point and the pen tip. They are both 50mm. Each arm end has a set of points where it can exist that scribes a circle. If the desired pen point is within reach of the machine, the circles (green ones) will cross at two points. The solution is a well documented process. I used the C code from this page. So far, I found that using the location, of the two, with a higher Y value is the one to use.
• Step 2: Find the Pen B point. Pen B is easy to find because you now know the slope of the Pen Arm. Multiply the X distance from the pen tip to the Pen A point by the ratio of the length of the pen arm (80mm) over the length of the arm from Pen Tip to Pen A (50mm) and add it to the pen tip. Do the same for the Y axis.
• Step 3: Now that you know the Pen B location, you can do the intersecting circles (red ones) trick again. This time I used the left most point of the two.
• Step 4: Find the angles. Use the X and Y distances of the crank tips and the atan function to get the angles. ( angle = atan(deltaY / deltaX) )

Another problem with non linear machines is that moving between two points will not be a straight line. The points will typically be connected with a slightly curved line. You need to constantly recalculate points along the way to keep it straight. If you break a line into smaller segments, the connecting curves also get smaller to the point where they are not notices.

Electronics.

Everything I chose was for prototyping ease and probably not the final solution. I used an Arduino UNO as the controller. I used a PCA9685 based servo motor controller for the servo. The Arduino could probably handle it on its own, but the wiring is so clean and simple with this. I used a breadboard power supply to power the servos. It had a handy switch to kill the power to the servos without killing the Arduino.

The Results

Here is a video of the machine running. The rectangle is hard coded via some for loops recalculating at 1mm increments. The results are shaky, but consistent with the Line-us results. The machine is quite rigid. Most of the shakiness comes from the servo motion. I also do not have the machine held down. If I get some magnets like Line-us, it might help.

Open Source (sorry)

I don’t think it is fair to the Line-us folks to release any files at this time. I think there are plenty of resources in this blog post if you want to clone it yourself. So far I only have about 5-6 hours into the project, so it is pretty a pretty easy project.

The real Line-us looks very polished and they are selling it at a good price. I am sure a lot of the work they did was on the UI, which I did not replicate at all.

Next Steps

I need a way to stream drawing data to the machine. I would like to use g-code. It also needs a UI and I thought Easel might be best. For the gcode I might try hacking Grbl. I would just add a timer that reads the current location at about 5hz, send it through the math and set the servos. Any value above Z 0 would be pen up.

For Easel, I could create a template that shows the usable work area. You would then just click Carve.

Firmware

Here is the firmware I used.  It is a quick and dirty port of my PSoC port of Grbl. I cannot give support for this. Only experienced PSoC programmers will be able to install and use this.

Grbl Line-us PSoC Firmware

CAD File

Here is my STEP file of the design. This contains all of the printed parts and some of the hardware.  You will need to figure out a few things on your own.

Line-us Clone STEP File

The Bipolar ORD Bot

It’s ORD Camp time again this weekend.  Every year I have done a gonzo build of some type of CNC machine.  This year I only had a few hours to spare, so I wanted something simple.  These are never meant to be practical machines, just conversation starters.

This was hacked together and programmed in about two evenings with stuff I had laying around, but working at Inventables means there is a lot of cool stuff “laying around”.  It was inspired by the RepRap Wally 3D printer, but vastly simpler in construction.  This only uses a couple of fabricated parts.  There are (2) sets of indentical actuator arms.  The inner arms are hard mounted to small NEMA 14 stepper motors.  The other end is attached  to a wood base, but free to rotate on a bearing.  The outer arms are mounted to the stepper motor shafts using Actobotics hubs.  The other ends have 1/4″ I.D. flange bearings.  These are bolted together, but free to rotate using a screw with a holed drilled for the pen.  That is basically it for the mechanics.

The stepper motors are driven with some high resolution stepper drivers.  These are driven by stock grbl 0.9 firmware running on an Arduino UNO.  The UNO does not know what the heck it is driving though.  The resolution is done in degrees.  I wrote a quick conversion tool that converts Cartesian gcode to bipolar gcode using these formula.

• L = 150mm
• A = 90mm

I have my CAM software output circles as multiple lines, so circles don’t need to be dealt with.  It has an odd, shield, shaped work area that you need to stay within.  Before powering on the steppers, you place the pen at the top middle of the work area.  You then tell grbl that both angles are at 51 degrees with G92 X51 Y51.

Here are a few more pictures taken at this weeks Beer and Making session at Inventables.

The shield has a solenoid driver that I was going to use for pen up, but I never got around to that.  I kind of like how it runs so silently.

Here is a video of it running.  It is rerunning over an old plot to show the repeatability.   I think if I used true inverse kinematics the plots would look even better.  Maybe Machine Kit on a Beagle Bone is in its future.

UPDATE:

A few people have asked if the motors could be moved to different locations.  Yes, I think you could put the (2) motors on any (2) joints and still have a controllable machine.  Not all work areas would be the same size and some might have issues with much higher torque requirements.  I believe separating the the motors by one linkage, like this one, yields the best results.

Skate-oko-asaurus: The self replicating skateboard

We build a lot of skateboards for fun at Inventables.  Some of the guys even sell them at local craft fairs.  They thought it would be cool to have a CNC router optimized for skateboards that was easily portable.  I first thought about putting wheels at one end, then realized the machine itself could be a skateboard.  We thought it would make a perfect Gonzo Build.

A Gonzo Build is something we came up with at Pumping Station One CNC Build club.  The concept is that we try to build an original, “one off”, CNC machine in one evening.  They also tend to have a whimsical aspect to them, so we don’t take ourselves too seriously.  We usually get about 8-12 people to help build.  If parts need to be fabricated, they must be done that night on -site.

Building a stock Shapeoko 2 in one night is a challenge in itself, but we decided to up the challenge by totally tricking this out with every feature we could think of.  We did have a few master CNC building ringers in the group, like Tait Leswing and David Ditzler.

Here are the stats of the machine.

• 1200mm x  250mm work area
• Skateboard specific wasteboard supported by additional extrusions.  It is narrower than a stock Shapeoko 2 and about 3 times as long.
• Drag Chain
• gRAMPS Controller running grbl 0.9.
• Quiet DC spindle with full speed control.
• Feed hold / Resume / Reset buttons
• Homing switches on all axes
• Auto Z zero with Z probe
• Trucks and wheels
• NEMA 17 motors with dual Y stepper drivers.
• Portable dual 24V/48V power supplies with master power switch.

Most of the Shapeoko parts came from reject area at Inventables, so there are a few dings and scratches.

The wasteboard was cut from 5/8″ particle board on the PS1 Shobot.  It has a grid v carved into the work area.  There are threaded inserts for clamps, primarily around the perimeter, but there is a truck bolt pattern strategically placed so a cut out board can be flipped or remounted accurately . It is supported below by 2 additional MakerSlide pieces and tied to the MakerSlide rails above.  It is the bed turned out very rigid.  It does deflect a little with heavy rider but pops right back.  After the build, I added several coats of spar varnish to ward off the dusty footprints.  Biggest guy to ride it so far tips in at about 230lbs.

We set our selves a goal of completing before midnight.  Done or not, I was going to ride it at midnight.  We thought we were finished about 20 minutes early.  Everything worked fine except the Z axis was not moving correctly.  It had the classic stutter and random motion of one coil wire not connected.  We tried to find the problem, but over 2 meters of drag chain slowed us down.  Midnight came some we dropped it to the floor and I rode it across the shop.

As a skateboard, it is pretty much a joke.  On the first ride, we didn’t even have long board trucks, so the turning radius was huge and you can easily scrap an edge.  The front has a handle cut into the nose of the bed.  The ideal way to move it around is to lift the front and drag it on the back wheels.

grAMPS 1.0 Stepper Motor Shield

The newest version of the CNC controller software, grbl (0.9g at this post) has a lot of cool new features, but the two that caught my attention were the ability to compile and upload from the Arduino IDE and support for multiple Arduino types including the Arduino Mega 2650.  I have always found the I/O count and memory of the Arduino UNO very limiting.  I quickly compiled it onto a Mega and hand wired a RAMPS board for testing.  It worked great.

The RAMPS board is a famous open source RepRap 3D printer controller.  It is an acronym for Reprap-Arduino-Mega-Pololu-Shield.  It is so simple and hackable that I have used it for dozens of CNC projects. The RAMPS board made it easy to hook up all the wires, but you can’t just plug it into MEGA because grbl requires that certain I/O is grouped into a single I/O port.  RAMPS was designed for 3D printer firmwares that do not have that limitation, so things like X,Y and Z step are not all on the same port.  I am sure you could hack grbl to break that limitation, but I wanted to only touch the config files.

The RAMPS also has a ton of features, like (3) thermocouple inputs that are not needed, so I decided to make my own version of a RAMPS with just the features that a CNC router like the Shapeoko needs.  When I realized I could use the name grAMPS (grbl+RAMPS), I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible.  Here are the features I implemented.

• Stepper drivers for X, Y and Z.
• The Y axis is setup for dual drive with two ganged stepper drivers (like Shapeoko).  If you wanted dual on a different axis, you just need to modify the pin mapping a little.
• A spindle control circuit.  This uses a high power MOSFET.  I have it hooked up to a 10 bit PWM channel.  It works great with no thermal issues.
• Separate power inputs for the Stepper Drivers and the Spindle so these can be run at the optimal voltages.
• There are terminals to hook up a fan to cool the drivers using the motor power supply
• X, Y and Z limit switches are brought out to a terminal block.
• The Z probe function is brought out to a terminal block.
• There are buttons for Feedhold, Resume, grbl Reset and Arduino Reset.
• IOREF is used for the stepper driver logic voltage, so you could try this on an Arduino DUE board.  There is a jumper in case you have an old Arduino that does not have the IOREF pin.
• Microstep selection jumpers.

I hand assembled one in about 30 minutes.  The part count is quite low.

Final Thoughts

The only thing I would change is the power terminal blocks.  There are a little small for heavy gauge wire.  Everything else I like.  I like the clean layout. I love how fast and easy it is to assembly.  The parts cost is quite low except for the 0.10″ pitch terminal block.  That is a couple dollars by itself.

I have about 15 raw boards.  I would love to get them in the hands of some CNC builders.  I will be at Maker Faire NY.  Find me or tweet me, @buildlog, during the faire for a free one.   My hackerspace, Pumping Station One, will have a booth there.  I might spend some time there.

Source (CC-A-SA)

Schematic 32028

Gerber Files 16030

Bridgie – A new look for a CNC router

When our Hackerspace, Pumping Station One, had it’s mini router repossessed by a member who was leaving, I decided to design a replacement.   As always, I wanted to try out some new ideas on the build.  I also wanted a project made primarily in metal to force me to get up to speed on using my CNC Bridgeport.  The result is Bridgie.

Bridgie?

Bridgie was inspired by the Bridgeport’s sliding X axis, so the working name became Bridgie.  The other inspiration came from a sliding chop saw.  This was used on the Y axis.  The Y axis is remarkably stiff and makes the Z far stiffer than many other routers I have used..  All rods except for the Z are 20mm hardened steel and the 12mm ball screws add strength.  The X is even stronger and the bearings always stay directly under the spindle.  The entire machine weighs about 45 lbs..

Clean Design

I wanted a very clean design, so I designed it so it is totally self contained.  The power supply, controller, limit switches and motors are totally contained inside the body of the machine.  The only external interfaces are power and USB on the back.  There is also a fan on the back that blows directly on the motor drivers and flushes any hot air out of the interior.

Spinning Ball Nuts

It uses 12mm ball screws on the X and Y axes.  In order to bring the motors inside, I decided to use spinning nuts and stationary lead screws.  This actually simplifies things because you don’t need to put expensive bearings on the lead screw, you just firmly attach it to the end plates.  The lead screw becomes a structural member in the machine.  The bearing on the nut is important for reducing backlash, so I used a large dual angular contact bearing.  These were about $10 each from VXB.  I did not take too many pictures during assembly, so here are some screenshots and renderings of the design.

Exploded view of the nut assembly.

Top view of X axis nut area

Bottom view of X axis

Controller and Firmware

The controller is an Azteeg X3 with a Viki LCD.  I have used the X3 on a lot of projects.  It worked really well on this project because it has the on board SD card and works well with the Viki LCD.  The firmware is a highly hacked version of Marlin.  Here is what I changed.

• Totally altered the LCD menu system to be right for a router.
• Tore out all the temperature stuff.
• Left in the extruder features in case I want to add a rotary axis.  I have used the extruder as a 4th axis successfully on other projects.
• Added a Z zero touch plate feature.
• Added a G54 machine offset like feature in EEPROM.  You you set a 0,0,0 for your workpiece, you can recall this later if there was a power failure or other crash.
• The arrow keys on the Viki jog the machine.  In jog mode the up and down keys jog in XY.  The rotary encoder is still active and sets the rate of the jog, so you can jog XY in fast, slow and micro mode all from one screen.  Z can be jogged as well on it’s own screen.
• There is a feedrate override feature on the main screen to speed up or slow down the feedrate.
• All features are accessible via gcode, so pendant use is not required.

Homing and Work Offsets

The machine can be homed at any time.  The Z homes first at the top of travel before homing the X and Y so this is less likely a chance to hit a clamp.  Homing at the top of Z is not too useful for setting up your job, but the machine will now know the limits of travel and will never crash into the ends of travel.

The machine then homes at minimum X and Y.  There are also two other configured locations called “park” and “access bit”.  Park moves to center X, zero Y and top of Z.  The head is out of the way in this spot so it is easy to clamp the work piece in this location.  It is also has the minimum footprint in this mode for easy transport.  It also has an access bit location that moves the spindle to the front for easy access to change the bit.

You can jog and set a work 0,0,0 anywhere you want.  The machine resets it’s soft limits so jogging or G Code cannot crash at either end of any axis.  If you restart the machine, you can recall the last work 0,0,0 so a previous job can be completed accurately.

Feature List

• Work area 12″ x 8″ x 3.5″
• T Slot table (larger on all sides than the work area for clamping).
• Sliding X table – Like a Bridgeport.
• Spinning lead screw nuts.
• Jogging with the pendant arrow keys
• Z touch plate.  You can manual set the Z zero on the top of the workpiece or it can be done automatically with a touchplate.
• X,Y,Z limit switches.
• Park feature that moves the machine into it’s smallest size for transport.
• Weight: heavy…about 45lbs
• Soft limits.  If you set a new work zero, the machine still knows the new limits of travel.
• Does not need a PC.  It can run completely off the SD card with control via the pendant.
• No exposed wiring.
• Super quiet DC spindle.
• Cooling Fan directed on drivers, but flushes the whole interior.
• “Park” command shrinks the size to smallest footprint to help with transport.
• Freaking heavy at over 45lbs

Videos

To Do

• It would be nice to have easy access the the SD card.  It is buried inside the unit now and you need to upload files to it via USB.
• Add a real feed hold (immediate deceleration like grbl does now)

Changes.

• There a few thing I would do to make it a little easier to fabricate.  A few holes were difficult to drill and tap and some simple changes would make that a lot easier.
• I added an e-stop button since taking these pictures that cuts the DC power.