• Spindle Motor Update

    Martino Ferrari • 03/17/2022 at 11:45 • 0 comments

    The spindle motor supplied with the machine is not great, the control electronics is installed directly on top of it and its randomly failing (due false contact I believe), for this reason I decided to change it.

    First I was planning to buy a more pro spindle motor such as the Kress 800. However such motors are (in my opinion) way to big for the size of such small machine.

    For this reason I finally choose for a small and cheap upgrade: the Brushless Motor Spindle Kit 24V 12000rpm (link, note that I bought on aliexpress for around 65 eur link)

    This is a drop in replacement for 44mm spindle motor such as the one on the CNC1419.

    The motor has a much neater finishing,  it has bearing to decrease the run-out and it comes with its control board and a nice metal enclosure.

    The cabling is straight forward:

    • Connect the power to the GRBL board spindle output (be careful with the polarity)
    • Connect the tree-phase (UVW) cable to the motor (not the connector is unidirectional, you can not connect it wrongly)
    • Connect PWM, 5V and GND to the proper connector on the GRBL board (for my board look the picture below)
    • Left the enable unconnected


    The motor so far seems good, is much more silent and it seems reliable, it worked straight away with the board firmware (without requiring any change).

    The only negative is the impossibility to change the rotation direction of the spindle via gcode (there is a switch on the back of the control board)..

  • Limit Switches

    Martino Ferrari • 05/23/2020 at 18:03 • 1 comment

    Limit switches are not included in the 1419 kit, and you probably can live without it.
    However as I am a very beginner with CNC and I am kind messy I already crashed the axis several times... 

    So I decided to buy some random limit switches from amazon (I chose the HiLetgo V-156-1C25 mostly due the fast shipping option).

    The 1419 GRBL control board already support limit switches for X, Y and Z axis so for the electronics and software side it is quite simple, however the CNC itself does not have (at least I did not found) any placement for the limit switches and I do not want to use some hot glue and glue it permanently to the frame...

    So I made few 3D printer adaptors that I mounted to the frame:
     


    The design is not final and in particular for the axis Y I will make a new design in the future and I would like to make a new design for the Z axis with the two switches on the same adaptor.

    You can find the original design on onshape (I created different version for each axis).

    I will upload the final design in the next days in thingiverse (and here as well)!

    For the wiring I choose the normally closed configuration and follow the GRBL wiki that explain very well how to do it. 

    However I am not happy with this configuration as the accuracy is low and I also misused the micro-switch that should have been paired with a slope.  So I will probably end up to replace the set-up in the following days...

  • Software Setup

    Martino Ferrari • 05/22/2020 at 08:34 • 1 comment

    The machine I bought came with a mini-usb GRBL controller (version 0.9 something) and it has 3 replaceable  generic stepper drivers and different inputs and outputs (for limit switches, stop button, laser engraver, fan etc..).

    Overall the control board is not that bad for the price and my needs, however it is not enclosed so I will design a small 3d printed box in the near future.

    After assembling the machine the first thing I did was to run bCNC and Candle on my linux laptop to test the movement of the machine. It worked just fine, the usb device it is seen like a serial device (`/dev/ttyUSB0` in my case) and the two software worked correctly.

    However due to the placement of the CNC in my flat it is not very convenient to connect my laptop to the CNC so I chose to use my Raspberry PI 4 to control it remotely.

    I am very happy with this solution. The software I chose to use is cncjs, I used their official guide to install it on my raspberry pi and now it look like this:


    I can use the console to communicate directly with the machine (for example for setting the correct axis directions) and it stream the pi webcam to monitor the status of the machine remotely. So far I am very happy! :)