CNC Mill Basics Discussion - Tonight 8PM

[Bob Powers]

Hello,

I've talked about doing a short introduction to using the CCHS CNC mill for a little while and we can finally get around to that tonight! If you would like to join me tonight around 8PM at the space, I'm happy to give a short talk on how to use the mill for basic tasks. It should only be 15-25 minutes, but should really give people some confidence in working with this amazing little machine. 

Topics will include:

Safety & Operation

Basic concepts

Design considerations & constraints

Toolchains including:

Using Inkscape with GCodeTools plugin to engrave

Using Eagle with pcb2gcode plugin to make PCB's (WIP)

You can familiarize yourself with most of this by reading the mostly up-to-date wiki page here: http://www.hackmelbourne.org/wiki/index.php/Project/CNCMilling

Finally, if you have any ideas of things to mill, I'd be more than happy to see if we can help make that happen.

Cheers,

Bob

 

[Dave Chanter]

Hi Bob,

So I finally had a chance to go through your instructions with the Mill today and give it a go myself, but I have encountered some trouble right at step one, connectivity.

After pouring over Man pages and Google for some help with minicom and looking around at the ports myself, it seems like Laptop001 isn't even sending commands via the serial connection anymore. I ran minicom and grblfeedr with sudo to ensure no permissions or funny issues. With no luck, Grblfeedr says it is connected but monitoring the serial channel reveals that it never actually sends any data to the mill, Minicom just stays in an 'offline' state and likewise doesn't appear to actually send data to the mill.

I'll have a bit more of a look but I'm honestly not too sure where to go from this point.

Dave

[Robert Powers]

Ah, hummm... are you using 115200 8/N/1 on /dev/ttyUSB0?

-Bob

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[John Spencer]

*cough* emc2arduino *cough*

actually, yeah, I think we wiped it to test LinuxCNC as a control interface, and it might not have been put back to marlin.

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Dave Chanter <dcha...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Robert Powers]

I did *almost* forget to do that, but then had to reconnect everything to reflash the Marlin firmware.

-Bob

[Robert Powers]

But, on second thought, as that was the very last thing I did with the mill. I didn't test that everything was working again, so maybe it didn't go as smoothly as I assumed it would.

The quick way to be sure would be to grab the space AVRDude (I think it's in the server rack, on top of something near the top?), hook it up as shown on the wiki and flash the .hex file that should be in ~/Git/Marlin/Marlin.

From prompt:

cd ~/Git/Marlin/Marlin

make upload

or if you need to rebuild

make clean && make all && make upload

If it's not 'make upload' the last target might be 'make flash'

Cheers,

Bob

[Dave Chanter]

You know....

I see the Recent Changes section mentions the speed change, but we should really just update the WHOLE wiki document, because here I am trying to follow the specific troubleshooting steps which keep telling me 9600.

I now have movement!!! speed change to 115200 was the trick.

Okay,thanks for the speedy reply.

DC

-Bob

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[Robert Powers]

Yeah, you're absolutely right - sorry for the confusion. I hoped that putting things at the top would have helped but I've been meaning to do something about that page ever since writing that section! I'll probably have some time this weekend so I'll put that on the list.

Cheers,

Bob

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[Dave Chanter]

I updated the speed reference FYI, Will update anything else as I see it, happy to sit down with you on a Tuesday night and go through it.

I see what you mean about cleaning up the GCODE, I'm getting some strange results even with the cleanup process, I think we need to take a good look at rewriting the cleanup script for the Marlin instruction set. Happy to help where I can.

Still amazing fun to play with.

Bob

-Bob

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[John Spencer]

*cough* emc2arduino *cough*

sorry, I clearly still have something stuck in my throat there :)

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[Dave Chanter]

FYI: 

Last Night (Tuesday 13th) I took out the CNC Mill and successfully sent it a job that was made in Inkscape, I used Printrun (AKA Pronterface) to feed the code to the mill and it behaved very well. I found a few tweaks RE: Cleaning GCode which I will look at automating.

Dave

Bob

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