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With all the milling down I turned my attention to the electronics, consisting of a small Arduino micro clone and two rotary encoders with built in push buttons.

 

 

Here is how the complete assembly looks.

 

 

Here it is installed on the side of the control panel.

 

And here is a short video showing how the two rotary encoders work in LinuxCNC with the Probe Basic user interface.



The LinuxCNC ArduinoConnector by Alexander Richter worked surprisingly smoothly. However I did find a bug in the Python code when it came to using the encoders in up/down mode instead of counter mode. I'm going to report that bug in the forum thread for the Arduino connector, however it was not a show stopper as I simply switched to counter mode instead.
 

OK next is to test the FPGA interface

Can you power down the system, unplug the flat cable from the 7I33
power up and without launching LinuxCNC, a report the results of this
command:


mesaflash --device Ethernet --addr [your_cards_IP_address] --rpo 0x1000

[your_cards_IP_address]  is likely 10.10.10.10 or 192.168.1.121

 

I wanted to add, I downloaded linuxcnc from the official website, installed the system several times, the problem remained. If I understood correctly, gmoccapy intercepts some mdi commands, this is somehow connected with the probe screen, accordingly, when I open the file with g-code, an error occurs. I would like to make a video describing the problem, but my knowledge of English is very poor.

I spent the last week with a really bad cold and while being bored by the need to rest and stay calm I decided to design a small addon for the control panel on the mill.

When I first designed the control panel I had never touched a CNC mill so I had no real idea which physical buttons that I would need.

After using the machine for a while I have realized that having rotary encoders for controlling feed and speed override would be very useful as it would mean that they could be operated while wearing gloves which does not work very well with the touch screen.

As I had plenty of time to kill this addon might have gone a bit over the top but it's very sturdy and works really well.

I started by milling the body out of some 6082 aluminum.

 

 

 

 

I then milled a face plate from a 2 mm thick scrap piece of stainless plate that I had laying around.