Now that the machine is fully assembled, I could connect all the wiring, power up the machine, and drive it around a bit!
I didn’t mention in prior posts, but in between other steps while waiting for glue and/or epoxy to dry I worked on the electronics. I soldered together the serial connectors and resistors for the steppers, wired up the power supply, then connected everything to the Gecko G540 and an old PC. I installed Linux CNC on the PC and ran through the setup wizard. I was able to run the steppers and test everything out on the bench before they were installed on the router.
I started the machine checkout by driving each axis back and forth manually, checking the travel to ensure the actual travel matched the commanded distance. It did not match at first and I believe had to go back and change the microstep settings. With the distance corrected, I slowly increased speed and nervously continued to drive each axis back and forth, faster and faster. I homed each axis and set up conservative soft limits so I wouldn’t accidentally run the machine off the end of an axis. Everything looked good, and I was able to get up to the maximum speed, as limited by Linux CNC, based on the conservative latency settings I had entered. This was about 12500 mm/min or about 500 ipm. I may try increasing the maximum step rate settings (lowering my conservative jitter setting), but for now this is plenty fast. Per my design calculations, it should be able to run significantly faster.
With everything working well in manual mode, I loaded one of the sample files that came in Linux CNC and ran some test “cuts” through the air. First 2D, then some 3D profiling. That was really exciting to see the machine running around for the first time on its own! I had to call my wife out to the workshop to watch it with me, and lucky for me, she was equally excited to see it finally running!
My first “real” test was to install a pencil in the router collet and manually draw a square on a piece of paper, using the built-in set-distance jogs. I measured the sides of the square and compared the cross corner measurements to check accuracy and squareness of the machine. The distances looked dead on, but the squareness may be out by a few thousandths. I’ll have to make some proper cuts to be able to measure it more accurately.
Before I make any cuts, I want to install drag chains, a dust boot, the e-stop switch and perhaps some limit switches.