Been lurking for about 6 months. Finally made an account so I could post my progress. I printed everything in PLA, but that may have to change depending on how it holds up to the plasma.
I’m using a cut50P from amazon with one of their machine torches. (It should be here sometime in the next month.)
I haven’t ordered the hardware on control board yet, but I’m almost to that point.
I’m mounting the cnc to the steel with rivnuts, as well as the spoil board. Still waiting on t-nuts so I can finish up the spoil board, and casters so I can weld them on the table and then paint the whole thing in a fluorescent green.
Oh…you might really want to test with a throw away board first. A crappy plasma will destroy a board. Dui went through a pile of boards before he figured his issues out.
Yep, grounding is definitely a must. I ran a plasma cam table almost 20 years ago, and it took us a minute to figure out the emf issues. Gotta shield the machine, as well as ground the wires.
Yeah, as Ryan suggested, maybe try it first with some cheap arduino, like an arduino uno and a CNC shield (probably the cheapest solution), just to make sure you’ve properly grounded everything.
Would be a shame to ruin such an expensive board, I recall I’ve burned 3 or 4 arduino mega because of that, lucky for me they are very cheap in China.
Uploaded with Arduino IDE 1.8.9
3)Connected with cura, ran M501, then m500 to eleiminate EEPROM error
Get display message V1 CNC Ready
power off, unplug from computer
6)Power on to check - randomly freezes up when navigating through menus, sometimes it doesn’t even make it past the boot loader. Doesn’t matter how many resets. LCD stays lit, but goes blank.
7)reconnect usb, reset, everything works just fine. Can navigate through menus without freezing.
Mild heart attack: Tried a fresh firmware upload and bricked the Archim board.
1)Downloaded most current Arduino IDE
2)Re uploaded firmware - bricked board. Blank screen, Flash blocked.
3)Panick
4)Force windows to use RAMBO driver from reprap wiki for com port
5)While connected to PC with Arduino IDE opened, Hold ERASE, wait 1 second, Press and hold RESET for one second, release both.
6)PC prompts for installing amtel device, upload firmware : Success - no longer an expensive paperweight.
7) connect cura, issue M501, M500
8)Reset
9)Disconnect USB
10)STILL FREEZES
And I do not know what erase does, never tried it.
If I have an issue I re-flash, make sure Archim is selected in the boards menu and you do NOT have u8glib installed.
There are a bunch of these out there now and I have not had any other issues. If it continues for you I will set mine up again and double check. At worst it is just a LCD timing issue. I think I have a know timing issue LCD to test with now.
Troubleshooting leads me to beleive its power related. Using a phone charger to supply additional power through the usb connection leads to stable operation. Next to test it with the motors and stops connected.
No dice. It doesn’t matter how many times you restart it, it still locks up (if you’re lucky enough to even make it to the main page.) But the moment you plug in a second power source, it works fine. I was able to get everything set up and draw the crown. The dual end-stops work great, the only hiccup was that the z was inverted.
Not sure if the board is faulty, or if there would be something in the firmware that might cause this behavior?
Router should be here Tuesday! (Wife wanted to start cutting some projects sooner rather than later, so I’ll have to re-do all my wiring for the plasma cutter sometime in the future.)
Some update pictures:
Put some wheels on with levelers.
