It’s been a while since I’ve joined the conversation although I follow along almost daily, so I thought I would share what I’ve been up too.
I have had this plan to build a box to house all of the electronics since I got the machine over a year ago because I don’t have a place where I can keep the machine set up. My initial thoughts were that I was just going to make a box so that all of the electronics would be housed in a permanent box and everything would plug in into it. As you can see, it evolved in to something much more.
One of my biggest issues with not having a permanent setup was repeatability. Having to always move the machine around to use it, the wires would jiggle around in the Gshield and make it a pain in the rear when ever I wanted try and make something. I would spend an hour or more setting up the machine only to have to fiddle with it during the cut to get any kind of consistentcy. There would be months that would go by that the machine would just sit there because I didn’t want to futz with it. It was just easier to use the band saw or table saw to get what I was after. So that brings us to the new box. It is still a work in progress but here are some of the features and future modifications.
The number one must have on the box for me was the “Oh Shit” button. As stated above, I had a lot of issues where I was frantically trying to shut off multiple switches to the get the thing to stop before catastrophic failure. Now I have one power cord coming in to the back with a master on/off switch, with the e-stop switch spliced in between the electrical outlets that the power supply and router plug in to. When something goes wrong the whole thing shuts down.
The second was that everything need a spot to plug in to from the outside of the box. This made it where I could completely decouple the x-carve from the electronics. The X, Y, and Z axis use BNC connectors that plug in for use and the USB has an external panel mount extension.
Following along on the forum, I saw people were making torsion boxes and tool holders so I thought that would be perfect to incorporate in to my box design. My initial thought was that the box was going to be standalone but I hated that I always just threw everything on the spoil board. On the other side of the electronics enclosure is a full deoth drawer to put all of the tools, tooling wires, safety glasses, etc. Zero clutter has been key in making my new setup a breeze to use! The drawer just slides in and out, so you can easily take it out to find something in the very back.
Here are a couple of pictures with the x-carve setup and ready to go, minus my laptop plugged in. I use the full length of the USB cord to keep the dust as far away as possible.
So, what’s next. I have two 24v fans on the way to help in removing heat from the enclosure that will be plugged in to the spindle location with the switch flipped to on. I originally had an old X-box fan, but it was late and forgot that the power supply was 24v. Let’s just say the pixies weren’t very happy… I also need to wire up the start, pause and cancel buttons to the arduino as well as run the wiring for the limit switches. I have made provisions for the probe function, but I am not sure if that is something that I will do. I planned for it as a just in case. I might also add LED’s to the gantry and in the electronics enclosure, although the lights on the gShield light it up pretty well.
Side note: The acrylic was engraved before I started assembling the electronics to test my connections. I goofed on one connector and mixed the wires up. I also goofed on the first engraving. I am used to using Inkscape and it always scaled correctly when I imported an SVG. I recently invested in the full adobe package and found out that Illustrator does not do this. A quick search on the forum and I figured out how to fix the problem and the resulting panel is the one shown!
Thanks everybody for making this an awesome community to be a part of, and I hope to chime in more often, now that I have finally figured this thing out! I.e Fidget Spinners!