I’ve been working on this for about a month now and wanted to share my progress with my MPCNC. I’ve added LED lights under the tubes to light the work area and put the wires in chains. Some of the projects I’ve started are making some small signs and started making clocks for my friends.
I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to make the router turn on and off with the marlin firmware. I have some 5 amps relays that work with arduino boards but would like to figure out a way to have the router turn on when the program is started and turn off when the program is down. I’ve not seen anyone try or talk about this. Any ideas would be great?
Nice lights. Are they just up there with the adhesive that comes applied? If so, I wonder how well they will stay up there with all of the vibration.
As far as turning on and off the dewalt router, I don’t see a reason why you couldn’t use a relay since the stock power solution is only on/off. If I was going to do that, I would get a relay that is totally overkill and use the small relays you have to trigger the big one. So it would go ramps board --> small DC relay --> big AC relay. Your best bet is to wire it into an outlet and proper enclosure for the outlet. That way you don’t have to cut the chord to the router and could upgrade easily. It is better to go overkill and safe than something that is borderline sketchy, especially since it looks like you are in a school environment.
We do something similar at work when we get bench tools or drill presses. We use foot switches to trigger outlets wired to extension chords. That way the tool only turns on when you turn on the power switch AND have your foot on the switch. It has saved me a few times while drilling dense plastics. If the bit catches and starts flinging the work piece around it is super easy to just step away and let it turn off instead of reaching up and hitting the ESTOP button.
Read online about the m42 command supported by Marlin . It will switch any spare pin on the ramps board. I’m not sure if a 5anp relay will be enough for a router but there are larger current relays available so I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Once you decide on the i/o pin to use then you’ll just have to put the m42 code in your post processor to automatically add it to your gcode files.
The dewalt is 600W, which is 5A at 120VAC. That’s too close for my comfort. There’s also something about it being an inductive load… There’s some kind of diode you need, I don’t remember right now.
You can easily control it with one of the digital pins. Even the pwm one for the cooling fan would work, but it is 12V, so you either need a 12V tolerant relay board, or you should reduce the voltage with a divider. Also,if you are using pwm, you’ll need to only use 0 or 255. Some low pass filtering might be necessary, but I would try it first. You will not be able to control the speed with a relay.
I second the idea of building it into a box, AC will kill. No joke. There are also boxes that have an AC plug, and take arduino voltages as input. They are about $40, IIRC.
I was looking at a relay like this one that would be controlled by the arduino. It’s rated for 10 amps ac so it would handle the start up load of my router which is 5 amps. Here’s the link.
