Centroid CNC4
forhire
I was wondering if you have spindle speed control on your CNC4? I have been trying to figure out mine and I don't really understand what is going on. I would like to update this as well but I am not sure how to proceed. CNC4PC and Pico have spindle speed control boards but I have no idea if they will swap easily with the CNC4.
I have spindle ON and OFF using M codes using one of the relay outputs. The CNC4 has 8 outputs standard. These trigger a relay that turns on the motor. My motor has a VFD which I can manually set the speed (in addition to the belts).
M3 Spindle rotation clock wise (cw)
M4 Spindle rotation counter clock wise (ccw)
M5 Spindle stop
For my purposes on/off, fwd/rev is enough. I ran without spindle control of any kind for years... it just made leaving a job running at night an issue of leaving the spindle running for no purpose. It's nice being able to stop the spindle if the machine e-stops
Being able to stop/start the spindle makes tool changes faster.
I looked at two BOSS cnc mills this week. Both had manual speed adjust and manual spindle on/off. No trigger from the control (one was Ah-Ha and the other was Mach 3).
With a VFD control, most want a 0 to 10v trigger for speed control. If you have a VFD look at your manual and it should give you some ideas. I'll post up a picture of my relays tomorrow.
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In all I had to buy two 60 tooth pulleys and 1 belt. Easy change out. Spent about $100. The machine is now 16000 steps per inch!Not sure if I see any readily visible change or improvement. The steppers rapid a 600 rpm. Not sure if I can (or dare) go faster. With the new ratio my table rapid is 60 ipm... exactly half my old speed
Not sure if it was worth the trouble.
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forhire
I was wondering if you have spindle speed control on your CNC4? I have been trying to figure out mine and I don't really understand what is going on. I would like to update this as well but I am not sure how to proceed. CNC4PC and Pico have spindle speed control boards but I have no idea if they will swap easily with the CNC4.
I looked through the cnc4 manual and I didn't find any indication that it supported spindle speed. The big question is does your spindle have speed control other than the manual crank on the front currently. It should be trivial to add speed control if you have a vfd. Otherwise on/off would be the easiest and cheapest to support.
Here's the of my relays I currently use with the cnc4. I'm planning on using the solid state relays on the Pico.
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Had to take a few days off the machine, my wife gave birth to a baby boy last week and had to shift priorities a bit.
I have no manual control over my spindle speed. The previous owner removed all manual control on top of the spindle. There is mention of speed control in my manual that has to meet a few conditions, pg 35. It says that the controller has to respond to Binary Coded Decimal numbers 0 through 39. There are a few other things but you might be able to find the page.
When I connected my comp to the CNC4 I was able to pull off the last program that was loaded on the machine. There is a line that ends in an M6 command followed by S3000. I am pretty sure its a command for a speed change but I can't get the machine to accept it as a manual input.
I am going to start buying my parts to do an upgrade this week but I would like to get this figured out before I get too far into it.
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