I just did mine and used skr stuff. If you’re using those black terminal plugs anywhere on the skr board, idk what others have noticed but my steppers and endstops were absolutely crazy because the connections weren’t solid. Switched EVERYTHING for jst-xh’s with a big kit I bought for ~$20 and my weird jitters, grinds, and endstop problems went away.
Edit: the plugs I don’t like are what lots of ppl would likely call servo connectors, I think jeff mentioned DuPont, might be the name. The black ones in your photos.
Thanks, Harry. I just checked all of the plugs, and while none of them seemed to be totally loose, it did look like some of them had worked themselves back out to some degree. I’m going to have to take extra care when cleaning up the wiring to either redo all of the connectors like you did or tape them up in a way that they won’t come apart.
I think @jeffeb3 might be onto something with the amperage though. According to what I can find on the touchscreen, the default amperage is 900mA (does that sound right?). The motors I have say they are 1.5A. If it’s this simple, I’m gonna kick myself…
After tearing it down again and running through a near perfect alignment and upping currents and…etc…I finally found the problem. It had nothing to do with currents or alignment or clamping forces. I’m actually too embarrassed to say what it actually was, but suffice it to say when this thing is built properly, it works amazingly well.
We’ve all been there. Once you’re over the pain (or mostly), it would be great if you’d share what happened. It will probably help others. (Tom, Tim, and myself will probably learn something, at least )
Thanks. While I’m waiting on my router, I think I’m going to play around a little more with plotting. I want to walk through the process of getting it to draw the logo for my wife’s bakery. Eventually, it’ll carve a sign or two for her.
You may be able to use the same gcode to carve once you get the drawing sorted out, depending on how deep you need the tool to go. I swapped the router for the pen, threw a v-bit in and ran the same crown code with no changes. The carving wasn’t very deep, but it worked as expected.
If you’ve included a connection for a Z probe, you may want to play around with this pen holder - it lets you probe with the pen installed to set the Z height.
Spent some time cleaning up the wiring and mounting the board/screen (after printing cable chain for a few days), and finally tried some practice cuts! Still have to work on my z-axis wiring and I am waiting on a couple of parts from Amazon to clean up the extra length of wiring on the side, but other than that I’m ready to dig in and learn how to make stuff.
It was a little slow because I haven’t been able to play around with speed settings much yet (especially non-cutting movements), but I was/am amazed at how well that turned out!
So I’ve been playing around a little more and doing lots of reading/watching videos, but I have a question about the actual workflow. So far, it has worked very well for me to work on the graphics and CAM on my PC to get my gcode and save it to an SD card. I plug my SD card into my TFT screen, manually move my router to a marked point on my workpiece and hit reset on the screen. When the screen reboots, I hit start print, and away we go. It’s nearly the same process as 3D printing, before I started using Octoprint.
My question is…I see nearly everyone has a PC hooked up to their router. What is the benefit vs what I am doing? I have manual control of the movement with the TFT and control knob, my router speed is manually controlled…? I’m just curious if there is something better I could/should be doing.
I do it the same way as you. I find I’m more productive if I do all of my design and prep work for my 3d printers, mpcnc & laser engraver on ONE machine, and then just transfer via sd card to the mpcnc & 3d printers (and via wifi to the laser).
I understand that having a PC hooked up may give you more control, but the TFT is easy, small, and less fragile in a shop than a PC, so it works better for me.
I don’t think many people have a PC connected. I think it is more common during setup. I use a v1pi on my machine, but I still use a laptop during checkout of a new controller or machine.
There are also thousands of users that never pop in here and I suspect they are more of the SD/LCD crowd.
Finally got around to cutting some wood over the past couple of evenings. I tried a simple pen & pencil
case that I drew up for a set I turned on my lathe. I found about 3 things I did incorrectly or need to fix, haha.
First and foremost, I need to work on securing the core. I had a lot more play in it than I realized when cutting foam. Other than that, it was just a few dumb mistakes with my EstlCAM procedure. It’s a very steep learning curve for me, but I’m having a great time learning on this machine.
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