Thanks to some excellent advice from other members on this forum I've now ordered a Omron E6C2-CWZ1X 2000PPR incremental encoder and some HTD 3M pulleys for it. Hopefully it will be a smooth install because not having an encoder hooked really has it's drawbacks.
While reading through the manual of my VFD I noticed it had an unused digital output and thanks to a custom firmware from PCW for my 7i96S board it looks like should be able to read the spindle load from my VFD which would be a really nice bonus.
Now that the machine is more or less mechanically complete I've ran the calibration for the Delta B3 servos. The X and Y axis went very smoothly while the Z axis took some fiddling with the speeds and parameters in the software since I'm not using any counterweight or gas springs at the moment to compensate for the weight of the head.
The calibration process essentially eliminated any overshoot during quick moves which was nice to see. That in turn helped me narrow down the backlash compensation values for the Z-axis where I'm still using the screw that came with the machine.
Here is a video of the calibration process running on the X-axis.
Next up I focused on the Slavetec Probe I bought a while back. It had to be aligned with the spindle which took 2-3 hours of fiddling with the adjustment screws.
After getting close with the hundreds of mm indicator I switched to a 1µm indicator and in the end I got a result that I'm very satisfied with.
Given how long time the alignment took I'm probably never going to remove the probe from that tool holder ever again so it now has a permanent spot in my cart with tool holders.
After that I was about to start numbering all my tool holders, measure the tool lengths and enter them into the tool table in Probe Basic. However I quickly realized that typing on the touchscreen was a bit suboptimal so I did a little side project and extended my control panel with a keyboard tray.
The parameters for the probing interface in Probe Basic seemed a bit daunting at the beginning but I think I'm getting the hang of them now.
