Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Interesting project... What are you using for the water jet? I've got inquiry from some food customers to cut cake, ice-cream, and vegetable. These applications just need pure waterjet cutting (usually other hard material need abrasive waterjet). I have demo unit of abrasive waterjet that can test ...

Interesting project... What are you using for the water jet?

The enable on the headers could be used. Marty the 24v enable? wouldn't that need a 5v pullup? I'm not using the stock supply now so I'd need to add a 5v source. Put +5VDC to the +Enable pin, take the -Enable pin to the Acorn Enable output on the header. Or yes, use a voltage dropping resistor. You...

I'm not at all sure that most home-shop type laser power supplies can vary the power level "on the fly". I may very well be wrong about that, but I was given to understand that there was little reason to try and vary the power during the cut, when it's considerably easier- and more precis...

Future plans for Acorn PWM are to pipe a 5 vdc PWM output to pin 14 on the DB25 and create two parameters to control the base frequency and duty cycle of the PWM to facilitate easy variable power control of Laser modules via Gcode. This is a new software feature (hardware is in place) and when avai...

If you are going to do any variable power work (not just on and off), I would expect a PWM input to the laser. The Acorn would not be able to do that. There is the analog output for spindle speed. Possibly that could be used with some interface/conversion circuit as needed. Although looking at the s...

Right, I was just reading about one-shots, and thought they may fit the need to count the pulses. I think I will give them a try. May be eventually it would be nice to figure out how to display a real-time flow value. There is one thing regarding one-shots I found confusing in the PLC documentation....

Thanks DannyB! I was overthinking this. You're right, a simple sampling of the input should capture the pulses. I have yet to jump into the PLC programing, but this sounds like a perfect reason to. I'll start reading now...

Hello all, In my cnc router build I am using a water cooled spindle motor. As I am sure you all know, the motor relies on a flow of cooled water that is supplied by a separate pump. I have the pump setup to run when the steppers are powered. It could be done a bit more sophisticated with a control l...

As I may have mentioned, I have no real experience with machining metal, except for the hacking I have done when building a mostly all aluminum 3D printer, and now this CNC router project. However, I am a woodworker, and know a little about working hardwood. Lucky for me, there are a lot of similari...