Slow progress on CNC upgrade

I'm currently doing a lot of upgrades to my YOOCNC 6040.

However every step takes at least twice as long as planned.

back access

My CNC mill is inside a wooden enclosure that keeps the chips from spreading all across the workspace and gives me a place on top of the machine for control box and power sockets as well as a place to attach the articulated touchscreen computer running MACH3 to.

To get to all the parts, I need access to, I had to cut a wide hole into the back of this enclosure.

(Particularly one of the cable chains runs down the back.)

Status: DONE

cable chain

As a first step I upgraded the cable chains. 

Because I would add a lot of cables for the end-stops, I wanted cable chains that can be opened up to access the cables within. However I ordered the wrong ones and they turned out to require too much of a bending radius. So I had to order different ones from Motedis.


Status: DONE

end stops

The first real upgrade are end stops.

I had the parts for these in the drawer for years but never got around to mount them.

There are these wonderful end stop mounts from David Ryan. However I soon found out that 2 of them required drilling holes into the machine.

So I designed improved ones that used existing screws and the T-Slots on the side of the work table.

Problem is, the Purelogic PLCM-B1 requires me to provide my own power for all inputs. 

Up to now I had a 5V wall wart style power supply hooked just for the tool height probe.

This required me to create an external box that would distribute and provide power for every input.


Status: IN PROGRESS

Beefy A axis

My old A-axis had a longneck stepper motor on a wobbly 1:8 XL belt.

The belt was the wrong kind to begin with (XL belts are for driving things without changes in direction.)

I replaced it with a chinese 100mm K11 chuck on a 1:50 harmonic drive.

Nothing difficult here except to source these damn chinese plugs used in the YOOCNC.



Status: DONE

A axis end stop

I wanted a homing switch on the 4th axis too. So I designed a mount for an inductive switch and a way to trigger it using a washer.

Status: IN PROGRESS

3D Touch probe

I got myself a nice Usovo 3D touch probe from the Sorotech shop.
Problem #1 is: It's normally closed while my tool height probe is normally open.
Problem #2 is: When open and supplied with 5V, it still runs at 1.6V while the tool height probe runs at 1.1V. (Both are very imperfect switches)
The PLCM-B1 optocouplers interprete 1.6V as HIGH.

So I'm currently soldering some CMOS NAND gates to
a) Trigger only above 2.5V
b) Combine both probes as NAND(tool heigh, NOT(3D touch probe)) into the same input channel for MACH3.

Status: IN PROGRESS

ATC and compressor

For serveral years I had my eyed on an automatic tool changer from USOVO.

However I could not find silent compressors doing 8 Bar at the low point of hysteresis.

Now I ordered one here.
It is advertised to have 10bar pressure in the tank and provide 8 bar.
...Or so I thought.
That advertisement from Frada-Shop is WRONG.
It starts up at just 5 bar and at 8 bar the safety valve goes off.
The tank (rated at 13 bar) will never, ever reach 10 bar.

Frade-Shop has not reacted with any word about this discrepancy in their advertisement and the delivered product. The only reaction was "your tank is too small".

I'll try to get it to start at more then 5 bar and hope for the pressure-booster that Sorotech wants to announce soon.

Status: IN PROGRESS

Bellows

One thing I want to add at a very late stage is bellows to protect the Z and Y axis from dust.
Dealers on AliExpress even have some cool looking metal reinforced bellows.

Status: TODO

Servo drives

Another upgrade I want to do later is to replace the stepper motors with servo motors.
They have become quite cheap in china lately.


Status: PLANNING