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I knew once I got my machine running I would have a million questions.
OK, so i have the actuators for the homing switches installed, and ran the homing sequence. But how careful are you all to make sure that your X=0, Y=0 spot with your homing switches corresponds to the (0,0) spot on the wasteboard from inventables? Should I move those screws around until the bit is right on there?
Second, if I have the machine plugged in, and I want to put a piece of wood down for carving, how do I move the spindle out of my way? Easel doesn’t seem to show me the little arrow buttons for jogging the spindle around until I’ve already clicked the “carve” button. Is there a place in there to be able to move the spindle around before I get into the final steps to start carving? When it’s plugged in and Easel is engaged, I can’t just push the thing out of the way of course. Motors are tight and locked at this point.
The homed position won’t line up with the grid zero on the waste board. It is used to define to the software where your machine’s extreme corner of operation is at. Once homed, you will want to jog your machine to the work zero point on the surface of what you want to carve.
As far as the silk screened grid on the waste board is concerned, I just made sure that the lines were square with the travel of the tool head so that I could line work pieces up square with the travel of the machine. It took a little bit of loosening and adjusting and tightening to really dial the grid in, but this is how I do it… In the end you could just completely ignore the grid if you came up with some other solution (like leveling the whole thing with a wide bit and carving your own grid).
When in Easel and you just want to move your tool head out of the way after finishing a job, you would just click the “Carve” button again and jog it out of the way. Then click the “X” in the upper right of the carve dialogue to exit the carve process.
One thing I will note: once you have your machine set up, try not to move the tool head around by hand very much. This will feed power back to the board because the motors become generators when they are manually moved. So, if you do need to move it by hand, you would want to do it slowly.
Well, it can. My machine is set up so the home position is spot on to the reference mark at 0,0. Don’t know that I’ll ever use that, but you can set it up that way if you want to.
