Recently I became extremely interested in milling and cnc machining Link to heading

The proccess of turning blocks of metal into precise complex objects quickly has always fascinated me, but I never took this interest furthur because of the expense involved, but I Recently became aware of the existance of these “mini mills”

and so I started poking around on facebook marketplace looking for a deal on one and right next to all the mini mills was this beast!

and for the exact same price as the mini mills which were much less capable and always of dubious quality, so after a small amount of deliberation and a quick examination I bought it and paid to have it transported to my garage, at which point I realized I had just moved a giant immovable chunk of metal into my garage.

act II Link to heading

after a week or so I had fiddled with the machine a bit and run a gcode file that I generated with the CAM tools in FreeCad and I was feeling pretty good about my purchase, but disaster was about to strike and cast me into the deepend, my grandfather visited and naturally wanted to know about the giant machine in the garage and I was glad to demonstrate, I went and turned on the breaker and powered on the main computer on the machine and did a little demonstration and everything worked perfectly we then decided to go to lunch so I turned of the computer and went to lunch, we were out for a few hours and when we came back the garage was filled with a horrible smell and all the axis of the mill were jammed to their extremes all of the axis motors were hot to the touch. I turned off the breaker and waited a while before digging into the machine I found that all of the motors had overheated and burned themselves out, at least one of the motor controllers had melted down and the others were in bad condition (sigh) this was going to be an adventure.

act III Link to heading

Fixing this was going to be no small task I spent hours finding new motors online, eventually I found a set that I believed would work and ordered them, the next task was to figure out how the controller worked it ended up being quite complex there were essentially two computers a normal desktop pc and an fpga that plugged into the pcie port, the fpga had connectors for ribbon cables that went to smaller daughter cards that did the actual switching of switches and motor control. Finding all the documentation for this was quite the challenge but I worked through it and got the motors connected the the controller and tested the software I now have a partially operational milling machine I’m skipping over a lot of details but I plan to break those out into smaller posts for example the story of figuring out that one of the daughter boards had one bad pin and why that required a brand new daughter board.

Currently the machine is mostly working Link to heading

but requires tuning of the motors and the control loops in the software before it’s going to make cut any metal.