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CNC Milling Machine Project Day 3

Today I worked on designing and 3d printing the mounts for my electronics, this included my PSU’s and my stepper motor breakout. These 3d printed mounts will allow me to screw them straight into the wood back. I also then worked on creating fan rails to be able to mount fans to be able to aduagelty cool my electronics. In the future I hope to make my own front panel for the case that has fan grills, or some sort of air filter. After modding the case I started to work on getting my control PC booted up with linuxCNC. I started the process of making a bootable usb, and I then fixed the computers booting issue with a new drive. I think that I should be able to get it up in running in the next few days.

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CNC Milling Machine Project Day 4 Today I started out working on finalizing the fan mounts. This will include going to the metal shop to remove some of the aluminum where it would interfere with the airflow of the fan. After I finished my work on that I went down to the tech center to get some old scrap ethernet wires that I will be using as my stepper signal wires. I then started trying to wire up and example driver with my hardline cable, this was hard as the cables were brittle and would sometimes break off in the terminal blocks if I moved them around too much. I think that I might go to start using the patch cable with soldered ends. This would make the connection way more durable because it would be more flexible. Tomorrow I will be able to wire up and hopefully start testing stepper motors proving I find a way to wire the AC power to the stepper’s PSU.   

Monday and Tuesday

Day 13 Today I worked in the metal shop cutting and prepping things to weld. This was most of my morning / afternoon, all the pieces I need are cut, and I am starting to machine their faces to prep for welding. This is being done on both a horizontal and vertical mill. The goal of this is to get really flat and square parts before welding so that the frame stays square. In the evening I spent more time in cad designing mounts for the electronics on the frame, as well as my spindle mount. Day 14 Today I spent the morning doing the first power ups of my case. I had just finished my last AC cable that I needed, and then I Got everything hooked up and turned on, although the first time I went to test, the circuit shorted and the power strip turned off. I just had a small short that was caused by a piece of over stripped wire, after I fixed that I turned it on, and got all green lights. We have power, and now all I have to work on is the computer side of the system. In th...
Weekly Reflection 1 This week I made good progress towards understanding, and assembling the electronics system. This has culminated in the creation of my electronics case for the machine. As of right now I have finished all the necessary physical mounts and mods, all that is left is to wire it up. This week I learned a lot about how stepper motors work, and how they interact with the drivers to get them to work. I also have been learning about G-code, the universal machine code language. It is useful to know when using a CNC because you can proofread the code live on the machine, as well as being able to edit and and insert parts on the fly. This can help a lot when troubleshooting a program on the CNC.