To start with the Mini Mill was out of action for some time as the spindle motor was believed to have been burnt out, but RobB found that it was working just fine after he did a nice job cleaning it:-) A series of tests were run and it looks to be working without fault. Now we have a spare spindle motor in case we really do burn the spindle motor out!
Next the controller was going to be fixed up but it got dismantled ... (I'm going to use some of Andy's “... “ to skip what would be a distraction) so now we (well mainly Ajax who has done a nice job) have put the controller into a good sized box.
The E stop saga continues. Well no, it now switches both the phase and neutral, cutting power to all but the laptop. Thank you to Lachlan who kindly supply the nice E stop and bits:-)
First tests went well to start with, then we started testing with a fancy pattern draw in Inkscape. Thank you to Bob who showed us how to get Inkscape to generate a cool test pattern:-)
After running the cool test pattern a number of times it decided to give Ajax some work to do, and it ran of the Y axes. After an hour or two (Ajax had some previous experience with this:-) the bearing and stop was back looking like it should look.
Michael et al kindly delved into the firmware to find why the limit switch did not stop the bed from running into, and through, the limit. By default the limits are not checked when running a job. A number of changes were made to make the limits kill the job.
Now we currently have the limits killing the job due to noise. It has been tested with the spindle motor off and both the Mill and the laptop plugged into a saturated core isolating transformer. Alas the limits are still killing the job so we are going fix this by changing the limit switch from normal open to normal closed. This means the wire going to the Mega is normal connected to ground and thus very unlikely to have any noise. To make certain, we are going the add opto's and a low pass on the limits just to remove any possibility for any noise on the limits to be an issue.
When will it be ready for me to use?
We do not know that we have all the bugs fixed yet, as we have only just started with the investigation into the RF and electrical noise. Hoping it to only be weeks for it to be in operation.