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JCDammeyer's 42 projects

Not ! You claim you always know where everything is. Organised chaos. :p

Nope, you are not reading me right. Yes, I do love organized chaos. That doesn't mean I like things hidden away in drawers where I can never find them. It means I prefer piles of stuff on surfaces. My chaotic organization is situational not everything has its place.
 
Almost one item ready to be taken of the list of 42 projects. I've wanted to consolidate the BoBs, MESA 7i92H and power supply to connect to the Raspberry Pi4 mounted to the back of the touch screen. Otherwise I have wires all over the place and stuff is loose. Just begging for magic smoke.

So today I installed all the stand-offs and mounted all the boards. There is room for a Pi with a CAN bus Hat in the middle if I decide not to use the small 10" touch screen. But it's progress.

Tomorrow I'll wire up the power supply and connect it all together. Ultimately this may run the CNC router or a small mill.
PanelStage1.jpg
 
There we go. All wired up. And clearly the power supply that both runs the Touch Screen and the Pi4 isn't up to snuff as the Pi4 is constantly complaining that the power supply voltage is too low.

The proper way of course to wire up the BoBs is not to generate the 5V for them from the 12V supply. Kind of defeats the whole idea of optically coupled and galvanic isolated I/O. So the right thing to do is probably get a 5A 5V supply and run the BoB's and Pi4 off that.

Notice the Blue Dongle. That's a CANUSB and there is code I've written for the LinuxCNC that sends and receives CANOpen messages to control the tool changer. That's one of the reasons I wanted this. So I can play around with all this.

PanelStage2.jpg


At this point I can set this aside until I finish a few other projects but at least now when I start it up again I don't have to look for cables, boards etc.

Many years ago (2005) I manufactured devices called WORMs. To program them I build an XYZ system that automatically programmed the panel. Used surplus stepper motors from PA. MACH3 for the CNC motion. Ultimately it was too slow and faster for me to just move the head by hand from board to board. Had I used good stepper motors and 5 TPI screws it would have been different. The whole XYZ system was disassembled and the pieces scattered here and there.

But now I have the infrastructure to build something similar again. But this time I would do the mechanics different.

Here's a very slow boring video if you want to lose just over 2 minutes of your life.
 
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