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Suggest a Mill
- Thread starter casche
- Start date
Joe got back to me. He cobbled it from an old mobility cart that was rotting in his driveway. Uses a 24V motor and variable speed controller complete with 24V charger and 2 old 12V car batteries. The drive unit was fabbed from the cart drive train
That's why that one Arduino based stepper driver looked so interesting. It uses what's called SPI to set all the parameters and I believe the direction but it can take step pulses in for the actual motion. Looking at the data sheet for actual chip I couldn't find an external direction input so adapting the driver to MACH, LinuxCNC or one of the other CNC programs would be likely more difficult.
OTOH, for $16 and the Ardunio UNO and a few switches plus some software and you have power feed for one axis. Stack 2 more and another $32 and you have all three. I think that setup, assuming there are 3 pins free for DIR input on XY and Z the Arduino could stay to init the stepper drives and the STEP pins from the CNC hardware would just be coupled to the drivers.
Be fun to do but I don't have a mill with steppers so it won't be my project. But it would fun to get it working.
I can afford the 1" of X-axis travel (he says now...........). ill try it....
Thanks. ill try to get some pics.......astill madly reading and trying to decide on magnetic or glass scales for the DRO
Extensive threads on here about that.
My vote is "strongly" in favour of magnetic but not for the reasons commonly stated like compact size, ease of install, easy to cut, etc.
Mostly, I like the fact that the magnetic tape can be applied directly to any flat surface and doesn't even need a rail. But a rail can be used where the surface isn't flat.
I also LOVE that magnetic is so thin that it can actually be installed INSIDE a bed if you want and have the right surface.
As far as function is concerned, you won't be disappointed either way.
The debate about magnetic resolution is over as far as I am concerned. IMHO, it was a red herring. I did some fairly extensive testing and couldn't find any evidence to support the concern.
Having a hybrid of the two, both work well for me. I did do custom designed mag tape on two axes where confined size drove it but the rest fell to glass (of various profiles) with its less costly scales having a long technology track record. More a horses for courses than one better than the other for me.
The glass involved careful measuring to size the travel correctly but after understanding that the seller adds in a small (ask them how much) over-travel on top of your stated max travel you can build in your desired total safe travel zone. In reality, I had plenty room on the machines for over length scales even if I didn’t use it.
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I think these are capacitance scales. They are harder to find nowadays. I have this Shumatech DRO-350 (and a spare in the box) on my mill and it was designed to work with these types of Chinese scale protocols clk/data. The later DRO-550 (I have two of those not in use) could also work with quadrature type while the DRO-350 needed an add on board to convert quadrature to the Chinese protocol.
At this point in time I wouldn't mind adding a second scale to the knee since that's used more often than the quill. Or just get a longer scale for the knee and forget the quill.
Or build the scale combiner as shown in the attached schematic. I'd have to look at the DRO-550 to see if it can handle 4 clk/data scales directly.
The DRO-550 is also open source but all support stopped years ago.
I'd be interested in reading what other scales people are using and why they like the one they have.
Attachments
I don't know how easy it is to find this info so I'll post it here so at least it's stored where we can find it.
@MikeANW - pretty much all the latest commercial units out there include combining scales. I know for absolute certain that Ditron and TouchDRO do. For example, if you buy a 4 axis ditron or touch, you can put the knee on one axis and the quill on another and then tell it to add the knee and the quill to display total Z. My Ditron is setup that way and I love it!
So much has happened in 20 years. Back then if you wanted a scale for mill it had to be glass. Then suddenly we had the caliper type scales and the Shumatech showed up. And finally the rest of the world caught up and now there is quite the selection and finding scales like the ones I have is harder. Who would have thought you could glue down a strip and move a sensor along that. So cool.
Mine has arrived. Ill see what it will take to fit it this weekend.....has anyone tried to mount one of these on the Z-Axis (not the Quill)?
What did you get, from where and for how much?
Vevor PAI-310S. $189.99
Ordered direct from Vevor Canada
Morning everyone;
VEVOR drive arrived for the X-Axis.........the mill handle shaft is about 0.672", so about 0.050" too large for the 0.625" opening in the VEVOR device. Currently building a new side plate (on the table) to replace the original one in order to side mount the motor, with proper table and motor mounting holes. Will get a few pics as i finish some of the steps. Will need to build a new bushing for the the motor bracket itself, and then bore out the actual drive gear to 0.672" to fit the shaft.