As a first serious test-run for our now servo-controlled cnc mill we decided to make an IOM bulb out of steel. It ends up a bit bigger in volume when made out of steel compared to lead, but the difference isn’t huge. Making it with a cnc mill allows designing almost any reasonable 3D shape [...]

Got the XYZ servos mounted and tuned. The first video shows a test program with some drilling G-codes. Rapids are set at 5000mm/min with around 400 mm/s^2 accelerations. Following errors stay below 0.02 mm. The second video shows a 40 mm face-mill at 3000 rpm cutting a 20 mm wide aluminium bar with 1 mm [...]

Mounted a servo on the x-axis of the mill today and did some PID tuning. The video shows a ca 300mm rapid move at 5500mm/min (217 IPM). Below some hal-scope views of what’s going on in the PID loop during the move. Here only P-gain is used and the machine needs to lag behind the [...]

For testing the servo-drives and all the electronics I found this test-panel for the HOSTMOT-4 conifiguration of the m5i20 quite useful. It uses an XML file (iotest.xml) to define the pyVCP panel layout, and then a HAL file (pyiotest.hal) to hook up the IO pins of the m5i20 to the panel. I’m also using a [...]

Stuart Stevenson wrote about his Dah-Lih EMC2 conversion on the emc-mailinglist, and has allowed me to publish these pictures of his mill. I’ve scaled the pictures to 1024 pixels wide – click the picture to see it in high-resolution. Machine after conversion. Machine before conversion. Pendant has original CRT and buttons. Control electronics. Jon Elson’s [...]