On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 11:22 -0500, Martin Pinkston wrote: > Good Afternoon listers, > I have posted a picture of my mini mill. > The reason I wanted to do a conversion over to EMC was because the Centroid > OS is very antiquated and when I saw what EMC would do, I knew it would make > the mini mill more flexible. > The Centroid OS has a very limited memory to about 250 lines on NC code and > no buffer. > And since I have a CAD CAM system updating the OS looked very doable. > Thanks, > Martin
I took some time to look at your blog site. The mill looks like it's fairly well built. I'm not a big fan of round column mill's but I have never used one and it may have some advantages. I see the Z axis is driven by the quill rack and pinion, which tend to have a lot backlash. You might consider, cruising eBay for a short ball screw (double nut or adjustable preloaded only) and mill up the bits to drive the quill directly with the screw. http://www.microkinetics.com/images/quillkit.jpg http://pico-systems.com/zaxis.html Considering the results of your other projects this should be a piece of cake. :) When you checked the axes for squareness, did you use an indicator and square clamped to the table or use the table surfaces? It looks to me that this machine should be pretty square. If the gibbs are worn the table might rock. A little Prussian blue might indicate something needing attention. The top two board pictures look like a dual power supply with PWM voltage or current control(?). The SG3526's are listed as REGULATING PULSE WIDTH MODULATOR. These seem to control the nearby power FET's which push-pull the large inductors just above the FET's, creating a higher voltage AC. The AC is then converted to DC by the diode array, just above the inductors. At the top, are capacitors that smooth out any ripple that the diodes pass on. My guess is that the red and black wires at the bottom go to a power transformer? The upper red and black wires go to the motor drivers? The next board down looks like the CPU/logic board which won't be needed. The next board labeled INPUTG on the upper right corner, I'm guessing is for digital input from limit and home switches? There are four power switches that may control relays or solenoids. The last board looks like the, or an, axis motor driver. How many of these do you have? I bet those red and black wires come from the first board. The screw terminals on the middle left edge go to the motor or motors? It looks like there is a microprocessor on this board, so there may be a proprietary motion command input from the CPU/logic board which the microprocessor turns into step pulses that goes to the power side of the board on the left, but then how does your .pdf file fit in? It would take more employing the little gray cells to figure this out. I may concede to Jon and recommend using the Gecko's. -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html California, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
