I spent Saturday running the soldering iron. Among other things, I was able to construct a trio of Hall Effect switches that I’m going to install on the CNC machine as home switches.
I breadboarded, then soldered the circuits together (I wish I’d taken a photo, because they looked pretty cool, all deadbugged up), then encased them in Sugru for installation on the machine. The Sugru makes them a little impossible to repair (although my other mounting idea was to use epoxy, so…), but makes the units look nice and neat, and it was oh, so easy.
I still need to figure out how to mount the pieces to the actual machine; I am torn about whether I will embed the magnets into the machine or what. The tolerance on the Z axis in particular is a bit tight. I’ll get it worked out.
With the limit switches built, I needed to finally figure out how much wire I’m going to need to build out the cables for the machine. I made myself some pencil sketches and have sort of a plan. I have a feeling that I’ll be heading back to Home Depot for more CAT5 at some point.
I also don’t have a good feel for how I’m going to get the 3-wire sensor cables hooked up. I will check to see if I have telephone cable of sufficient length (and with 4 conductors…). I may end up just running full CAT5 to each point, and only using 3 wires. Or I may end up stripping out 3 conductors from a piece of CAT5… I don’t know. Like I said, I’m a little torn.
Once I get cables cut, I need to run them properly. I haven’t quite got a handle on how to keep the cable runs from fouling. I will probably start with the split tubing that I ran on the telescope mount, but I have a feeling that I’m going to end up with some of that nifty articulating cable run stuff.
When the cables are all installed, I can start working on getting some real stuff cut out. I need to run a series of easy cuts first, maybe a few enclosures that I’ve been putting off, then I can start thinking about cutting something for Lucy’s birthday.