No place like home

Post date: Jul 6, 2016 2:39:37 AM

Well, if there were a home on this machine. I got the control box wired up, though that doesn't include home or limit switches. As such, I've made it so "home" is specified in software for the moment. I'll definitely have to fix that (and the limit switches), but for doing some tests of how square things are, it's good enough. I DO have the ESTOP wired in, however.

Anyway, the pictures:

In the first image, you can see everything wired up. The steppers all have DB9 connectors on the, with the same pinout as the Gecko controllers use. Not that that's likely to become relevant (plot twist, it became highly relevant, added 2017/02/07), but it was as good a method of choosing pinout as any.

Anyway, you can also see the steppers mounted (left side of the right image), plus the heatsink on the outside of the box. I sanded the coating off both the inside and outside, then added thermal paste to all interfaces in an effort to get a good thermal connection. The sanding was a pain, but that's the way it goes.

The only other thing to point out is the mess of cables. In theory things will get a little cleaner when I get around to ordering the right DB25 connector- I got the wrong gender this time around. In practice... it works, so it'll probably stay like this a while.

Not pictured is the table, which finally has all of the holes tapped (I got a nice blister doing that). At least all the holes that are drilled- there are still a few more that need drilling, though if/when that happens again remains to be seen.

It's probably time to get some help moving this to the 240Vac outlet so I can do some test cuts... Well, after I drill out the final 3 holes for each of the Y axis rails. Those aren't quite aligned, so I'll just drill them out and put nuts on the back. No big deal.