Well, as per normal in the way my life and hobbies go, it took two months to get back to the CNC once I’d determined that the cables fit properly.
I decided that I was going to push forward today, so the first step was to confirm that the control PC is still in working order.
The clock battery had died, so there was a little fun in the BIOS setup before I could get started, normal stuff.
Then I had to swap out the keyboard and mouse, because apparently an Apple keyboard and SmartMouse were not going to work in XP, at least not right out of the box.
Luckily, Windows populated the username for me (I never would have remembered that particular one), and of course I nailed the password on the first try, w00t
Mach3 came right up, and after hemming and hawing quite a bit (I did a lot of checking-that-the-motors-were-hooked-up and stuff, I turned on the G540, which booted up perfectly, and I was able to move the motors around manually in Mach3. Hey, this isn’t too bad.
OK, I admit that I’d hooked the motor cables to the wrong axes, that took a little figuring out (ended up looking at the fixture settings in Mach3 to determine the correct configuration — love it).
I left the spindle and sensors out of the equation, but crossed my fingers and re-ran the Fateful Test (“speeds n feeds”) that had gone so badly, all those years ago.
…
ran like a champ.
I ran it a few times, just to make sure that I understood what was going on, then I spent a bunch of time, re-bundling the motor wires, and re-rigging them neatly. It’s not 100% ship shape, but I don’t think any wires are going to catch on the machine.
Now, for the real test, I re-ran the test with the cables tailed properly (which is when things went sideways last time — electrical interference gets worse when the cables are in close proximity and running parallel to each other).
…
ran like a champ.
I shot a video of the happy occasion (too large to post without editing, of course), and after a small amount of messing about with the sensor cable and SuperPID (to no avail), I decided to declare victory and call it a day.
Things are really looking up! The machine works, and I would say that I’m probably 80% of the way back to where I was when I put this thing in mothballs.
Up next, figure out the sensor cabling, and then run sensor and s-pid tests.