I recently started building a lowrider and while i have found good information on many things that were not quite clear to me on these nice forums, i still would love to get some feedback on some things i have no decided yet.
I plan to be able to cut sheets of 125cm x 250cm… maybe a little more. So far i ran the calculator with:
x 1300 y 2800 and z 400 ( dont plan on using much height but i might want to cut styrofoam later )
I am done printing my parts, and have them assembled with motors only missing some minor parts.
electronics: i have a smaller cnc i run for a few years now based on mach3/cambam. i do have a spare mks sbase 1.3 board, i could use.
not sure which way to go here tbh as i have very little experience with 3d printer based boards for cnc controll. maybe someone
around that can give me some pointers of pro's and con's? or even how viable it is to use the mks sbase board for this.
fearing flex in the stainless steael tubes, i did think about adding a beam inside of the tubes. has anyone got experience with that?
( its gonne be a 25mm,2mm wall tube i hope )
12V vs 24V ? i got psu's for both here. how beneficial is it to run on 24v?
if you would rebuild your large lowrider from scratch, what would you do diffrent / improve?
thanks for your anwers in advance, i will be heading over to post some pics of my build the next days once i wrapped my head around the last questions ^^
regards Cidem
edit: attached some teaser of my galactic purple ( petg ) build
That board will work fine. Add in some drv8825s, and wire the double axes in series. If you’re not comfortable with wiring or firmware configuration, then a mini rambo board and a series wiring kit from Ryan is all you need. If you are comfortable with firmware configuration, then you can do just about anything. The full sized rambo will even let you run a separate motor for Z and X, with dual endstops. There isn’t a preconfigured version for it, but several people have played around with it. It is definitely a “beta” setup though.
2mm wall tube is more than the recommended 0.065", so I that should be fine. 125cm is 49", so that’s the size it was designed for.
The drivers are constant current. So they will push as much current as they are configured for. More current is more torque, or strength at the motors. Adding voltage doesn’t help at all… Except, when the motors move fast, they resist the voltage, effectively reducing the input voltage. So if you’re zipping around in between moves, the 12V might not max out the current like the 24V will. This is one (of many) reasons to cut deeper instead of faster if you can. Close to 100% of the V1 machines have been built with 12V, and it’s more than fine. When you’re moving at 40mm/s, it’s not usually while cutting, so the reduced torque is NBD. There was a long conversation with me and Ed Nisley(sp?) about it and I think we figured it was about 9mm/s when you would start getting a reduction, but it was over 90% of max over 15mm/s or so. Those are totally coming from my memory, and shouldn’t be trusted though.
I have a Low Rider V1, and I plan on upgrading to V2 at some point. I planned on having a 48" wide, and expandable length table. I have never found a project that would justify that. So next build, I’m going down to probably 36" width and 48" long. That’s the same size I have now, but my tubes are on the long side.
Last week I had a problem with dupont connectors not really fitting properly in JST-XH sockets. It works somewhat but for a permanent solution I would go with real JST-XH plugs on a pigtail. I cooked a motor driver due to the bad connection. Luckily for me the drivers are on carriers and not directly on the board.
The 32-bit ARM boards should work if there is a Marlin configuration for it, but from the sound of it they are not quite as simple as the ones based on the Atmel microcontrollers. If you already have it then it’s worth a shot. If you run into difficulty then you can decide whether to go with Rambo where everything is well understood.
Practically 12V or 24V only makes a difference when it comes to other peripherals like fans or a heated bed. And even then you can swap later so it makes even less of a difference which one you start with.
