Rods "Spaceship" Scratch built Plasma Cutter build

tommylight wrote:

Looking nice bro.

Thanks Tommy. Maybe tomorrow, The gantry will be in place. I think I have to be patient and make sure the rails are leveled with a dial indicator first.

Hmm, I think I found the cause of my spurious intermittent fault. It seems that the proximity sensor on the Z axis has failed and can no longer "see" metal. Its coming up to midnight here, so I'll replace it in the morning and see what happens.

I've had a few setbacks. First was a reminder that the tools we use are dangerous.



This required surgery and an overnight stay in hospital on Friday. Anyway, back home, now, no pain and the doctor was happy with the repair. I'll wait and see what it looks like when the bandage comes off later in the week.

I think I finally got to the bottom of my wiring issues. I thought it was perfect before going to hospital but today it refused to see the new proximity sensor and thus crashed on homing. I really struggled to see what was wrong so I concluded a dry solder joint so I hit all everything with a soldering iron again and it seems like it is all good after tracing it back with a multimeter to the control box. Its really wasted an enormous amount of my time. I hope its fixed now!

Because of all of my issues, I rolled back a few versions of my config and have been adding functionality one feature at a time with a view of implementing the new experimental PID based THC module.

Today, I worked on a cornerlock module to add to my library of plasma components. So far good.
I think I am now ready to tackle implementing the PID based THC (I had done it before but ran into various problems).

tommylight wrote:

Wish you a quick recovery.
And painless.

Thanks Tommy, the good news is there is no pain at all so I think it will heal well. I can even type with the fingertip. I was lucky as the milling cutter hit the bone between 2 tendons without damaging them.They thought I might need a skin graft but the surgeon was only going to do that as a last resort as it would cause other problems.

The annoying thing is that I wanted to use a hand drill to do what I was doing so I could clamp the part in a vise but my top quality fairly new Bosch cordless drill had failed when I went to use it so I held the part in my hands under the mill spindle. Anyway, at least the tendon did not get caught by the cutter and get wound up!

Well, becsaue I have not been able to do much over the last couple of weeks, I think I've got a fully configured LinuxCNC ssytem just waiting for the table to be finished!



There has been a mad flurry of activity in the plasma section so I am hoping i've built compatibility with CandCNC's CommnadCNC Sheetcam post processor. Many thanks to John (Islander261) for all his help in getting this far. I can't believe how deep into Linuxcnc I've delved into to get this far. Who would have thought I'd now be competent with Glade, python and writing Linuxcnc components in C to get this done.

The only thing I'd really like to be able to do is to add a tab to the signals tab to add a couple more configuration variables. I had a go at that this morning but the tabs are not functional. THere should be 3 in this image.



I've asked for help on another thread,
forum.linuxcnc.org/gmoccapy/32732-adding...w-in-gmoccapy-plasma
it would be nice if I could sort this out.

One of the things that was not well documented was how to read hal pins from gcode. I found that pin names are not able to be found if there is any uppercase characters in the pin name. Here is how you do it.
g1 x #<_hal[plasma.g0-gap]>

I Went through the plasma config and changed all the pin names to use lower case.

Note this is not going to work in a real time environment but to read static variables when piercing, this should work nicely.

I've also purchased a license to sheetcam and need to get my head around that too but I've created a number of tools and snippets in it. More on that later.

Well, finally getting some things coming together. I brought my table back from work this morning and unloaded it using my endless chain in the carport. Its been very handy over the years.



And then spent the rest of the day getting the gantry installed and levelled. I made a few stuffups with some of the laser cut parts for the gantry ends but nothing that can't be fixed but finally after 11 months, it is together.



I also have a pendant to wire in



Still heaps to do before I can try to cut something...