RobFromLDMS published a new build:

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I've been told there is another Shed building a Large Ox somewhere in Australia. On Sheds in general, the movement started in Australia, and has now spred to UK and some other countries. Can I give a plug here? See Men's Sheds | Australian Men's Shed Association for details.

 

I've been meaning to post our build for a while - it was your "post a build" competition that finally got me motivated. Could get a lot of fun new kit for the machine!

 

The machine is up and running now, but with some mods. We have updated to GRBL 0.9, which means we had to move the Z-axis limits to SpinEn pins, and parallel the two (upper and lower) Z-axis switches at the machine. What do you do when you have 2 Z-limits, as allowed on the board? It took a while to figure this out - the key is that the limits for each axis are paralleled on the Protoneer V3.00 shield. They are not recognised separately by GRBL.

While we were about it we installed some DRV-8825 drivers to better match our stepper motors, and tweaked the mechanism on the X and Y axes to run more freely and smoothly. The combination of new drivers, GRBL 0.9 and better mechanical adjustment is a definite improvement - our maximum X- and Y- feed rates have practically doubled.

We also have added a touch probe, (G38) which is connected to Analog pin A5 on the Arduino Uno. This pin doubles as the I2C SCL pin, so we just used the "SCL" connection on the shield as our probe connection. Again, only digging in the source code and careful examination of the shield PCB allowed us to work this out.

The commissioning runs made a set of beer coasters and engraved a label with the machine asset number on it, to attach to the machine itself. The sign is a bit rough - the cutter was not the best, as we haven't yet bought any dedicated cutters. The Amana 8-bit starter set is on its way.