I was really stoked with the initial success of my plasma mpcnc…until I tried to cut some thin sheet metal.
Thin metal requires the cutter amperage and air pressure to be turned down, as well as the feedrate to be cranked way up. Otherwise you get arc blowout as the spark has to bridge larger and larger gaps. With a pilot arc, this leads to the arc transferring back and forth between the material ground and the pilot ground.
When this happens, my axis movement begins to stutter and ultimately stops.
I’m wondering if there is a way to log of the endstops are being triggered during each blowout, or just any sort of logging function that can be viewed after the fact?
For grounding, each one of my steppers is grounded to a shield wire that terminates at the metal case. The Archim1 is grounded to the case, as well as the power supply. All of my wires (sans~4" at each stepper is double shielded with each shield being terminated to ground only on the metal case end.
I packed up the machine so I could do some work on the car, so I can’t verify for sure until later in the week. But if I remember right, the LCD didn’t ever indicate a restart. (As in it never went blank and rebooted) but I could be wrong, I was usually hitting the estop because if I didn’t, the plasma would stay triggered on.
Currently I am using an SD card for the gcode. I was looking at using your pi image on one of my old 2b+ laying around and giving octoprint a try. (I use octoprint on my 3dp.) But Im wondering how many new issues I may introduce by adding an octoprint into the emi nightmare.
@jeffeb3 alrighty, so I finished up my car projects and am back to this. The Archim1 IS restarting… except it’s doing it with or without the arc blowout, and with or without the plasma on.
My first step was to dial down my plasma cutter in an attempt to prevent arc blowout. That worked, but resulted in sloppy cuts. So I was tweaking those settings when I decided I needed to replicate the arc blowout issue anyways. So I went to cut some more tests (after having a completely successful cut run) and the archim shut down while I was navigating menus. Then I made a video and the archim shut down in the middle of a cut even without the arc blowout.
It’s probably a good time to note that even after the archim firmware update, I have had random freezes/restarts before I ever hooked up the plasma. To aid in my troubleshooting, I’m going to add back the USB power source that circumvented the firmware issue that was found earlier.
In this video, you can see the axis movement freeze at 37 seconds, then the archim shut down at 42 seconds. (From 17-25 seconds I am increasing air pressure to force arc blowout, but it didn’t happen.). YouTube butchered the quality of this video!