Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

nice! thanks for sharing!

In the spirit of keeping this thread up to date as I make additions and changes to the router.. I added a Hallmark ITTP touch probe with XoomSpeed wireless conversion. Works really well. Even from across the room.

Small box on the spindle allows for a wired probe, should I want to use one. The real reason for the box is the ProbeDetect pushbutton for use with the wireless probe. Works great. Adding the additional probe connection was too easy to not do it. Not sure it will get used.









First order of business was getting concentricity failed in. I got it to a few tenths. As good as it got today.





Then run a bore probing cycle on a known bore size and see how things look.







I am really happy with the probe and the wireless conversion. I'm excited to add this to the control. Lots to learn!

Well done sir!

Thanks, Clay!

I’ve been taking care of little punch list kind of things for the past few days. It’s so nice to relax and enjoy the shop. Good recharge for the coming year for sure.

It’s no secret I’m all about automating things where it makes sense. One such thing is my cnc router. I’ve had several things I’ve wanted to do for a while. I had all the materials on hand and in general knew what I wanted to do. The probe setup yesterday is one such project.

Today I got the air blast installed and working on the router. M code to turn it on and off. Should be really handy with plastics and aluminum. Hose was ran when I had the motors apart earlier this year.





I have a lot of electric heat.. 23kw. I can’t have it all running when I have the router, vacuum table and dust collector running. That’s over 15 hp of motor running at once. This little guy, actuated by M codes, tells my home automation system (HomeSeer) to disable the heat while the router is running. It has to be outside the enclosure so the Z-Wave radio can work. This is the simple solution I came up with. It works well.



Happy Holidays!!

Approaching four years since I did the Acorn conversion on the router. It has never, not once, pulled any of the crap that Mach3 did when I had it.

thanks for posting!

slodat wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 12:18 pm Approaching four years since I did the Acorn conversion on the router. It has never, not once, pulled any of the crap that Mach3 did when I had it.

I could not agree more with the last part of your statement. I switched from Mach 3 and would never go back. The acorn has just chugged along doing what it's told. No more weird stuff ever happens. I'm installing a second acorn now in another machine I have.

For anyone thinking about using Mach 3 don't underestimate the difficulties in learning cnc that will be made worse by a machine that has weird random errors. They will make you wonder if you did something wrong or if it's a glitch in the control. I had 3 machines powered by Mach 3 and 2 of them always had random problems. The third (running on a very old computer) did ok.

Very happy with the reliability of the acorn.

Great work Slodat, thanks for sharing. Excited about the plasma coming?

I really need to look into this “probe” thing. I’ll bet it’ll come in handy for what I do.

I don’t use probing as often on the router compared to the milling machine. Mostly because my material is often plenty big on the router for a given work piece. It is really nice when modifying an existing part, adding a feature, or rotating WCS.

I’m glad I have the probe on the router.

Yes, I’m excited for the plasma to get here. If I average their estimates it should ship in the next couple weeks.

slodat wrote: ↑Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:00 am

Yes, I’m excited for the plasma to get here. If I average their estimates it should ship in the next couple weeks.

OH no. you just put bad mojo on the release.....jynxed it.