Looking awesome! I am trying to not be envious! You may well get the floating-Z dust shoe in place and tried out before I do! I am close but so are you!
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X belt installed. I have a plan for bootstrapping the struts and table on the floor of the shed where the LowRider will go, and there’s a chance I could be up and running this coming weekend! (Now that I’ve said that, life will intervene…) Waiting to wire everything up until I get the gantry home; it lives at my small office space at the moment, which doubles as my hobby area for projects like this, 3D printing, building drones, etc.
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Hmm…I considered alternating colors but I don’t have enough of my other colors left…
Now I need to think long and hard about whether I need to order more…
I’m only 18 links in…so there’s still time 
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We’re not going to talk about how many rolls of filament I have purchased in the last month 
…
lol…I just ordered 4 more today…but mostly black. Overture had them for 13.99 on their site, so I kinda had to…
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Yeah, crazy-cheap Overture PLA Plus on Amazon. I bought a bunch of rolls too. That’s my favorite PLA.
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Nice! I’ll say again, love your colors.
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Feels like not much progress, but the shed out back where this will live is still being cleaned out. I have a goal to get my LR3 connected and moving next weekend on some temporary boards in order to bootstrap the struts and torsion box. Fingers crossed…
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A power and fan Pi HAT came today. I got the connector for the GPIO pins soldered on, and powered up the Pi with my bench top PSU at 12V. After a minute to boot, logging in to V1Pi (previously configured) went without a hitch. Perfect!
The LR3 is going to run off a 12V DC switching supply installed inside the gantry; this allows me to power the Pi and the SKR with only one AC power cord. I probably won’t wire it that way during the bootstrap process, but I will prior to installing the struts. The grand plan is to make the gantry as quick-disconnectable as possible, because the giant table is going to fold up against the wall of the shed when not in use.
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I have a similar shield for the pi that I keep on my nightstand. I need a new fan for it though because this one’s bearings have died. So I have kept it off so I can sleep. My pi seems annoyingly to hang right on the edge of two levels of the fan speed all the time.
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Wellll…
It’s alive… I think?
I want the option to possibly use the touch function of the TFT 35 at some point (unless I go totally headless), so I wired the Pi’s UART to UART 3 on the SKR. Because of the HAT, I soldered the wires to the appropriate GPIO pins (6, 8, and 10). There are UART pins on the board, near the bottom right; Rx to Tx and vice versa, and a ground connection. (I do not want to connect the boards via USB.)
Configuration changes I made on the Pi:
- I SSHed in and wrote dtoverlay=disable-bt to the end of /boot/config.txt.
- Running sudo raspi-config, I changed the serial settings to turn off console via serial, and to turn on the serial hardware (option 3, option 6, no, yes, finish) and then rebooted.
After the reboot, I opened CNCjs and used port /dev/ttyAMA0 with a baud rate of 250000 and it seems as though I might be connected to the SKR. I’m not sure how to test this, though. Nothing I enter into the Console window in CNCjs seems to do anything, so it’s possible I’m not connected after all?
Nothing is wired to the SKR yet (motors or endstops), as this is a preliminary bench test. If anyone has done this before and has suggestions, I’m all ears. Meanwhile, the Googling continues…
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For the time being, I have changed which UART the Pi uses on the SKR because I can’t get it to communicate on UART 3. I strongly suspect this is a firmware setting, but I’ve got other fish to fry right now. I connected the Pi to the TFT touchscreen UART and was able to get CNCjs to make a stepper motor (left over from another project) spin on the bench! I’m ok not having touchscreen capability for the time being; the more reading I do, the safer Marlin mode & CNCjs seem, in terms of sending good signals for machine control.
The shed is almost clear (pics soon); once it is, I can get the bootstrapping setup put together, put the gantry on its rail, and have it make its own motor noises. Woohoo!
(Also, those linear rails are not for the LowRider itself, but ARE related… 
)
Oh what I wouldn’t give for a clean, open spot in my garage…
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Lol. I hear that, but apparently “what I wouldn’t give” is the time to clean it up and paying the junk haulers to remove the crapstuff that is occupying the space
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Today was a bit of an adventure.
I was rewiring the control box so that the power wires exited through one of the outboard holes. In the process of doing so, I pulled a really rookie move and reversed the 12V lines going into the Pi HAT. Power on… Pi HAT dead.
Fortunately, the Pi was perfectly fine. For a little while, I was tempted to throw my hands up and just power the Pi with it’s USB power adapter… but then hobbybrain kicked back in and said “nah.” The search was on for a solution.
A Google search revealed that the Pi can be powered via GPIO pins 2 (5V) and 6 (GND). How to get 5V power to that pin? Turns out I had a spare BEC from a failed experiment on one of my drones that steps 6-60V down to 5, 9, or 12. Bingo! Some careful soldering, lots of Dupont connector crimping, and plenty of incremental testing later, and my solution was proven.
I also installed some 12V 40mm Noctua fans in the case. Their wires juuuuust barely reach to the terminals on the SKR, so their spade connectors share the motor power terminals with one of the power lines running to the switching power supply. The BEC shares the board power terminals with the other power supply line. I also made longer UART cables to connect the Pi with the board.
It’s alive! And all the things talk to each other, too!
The workshop floor has finally been vacuumed with the brand new wall-mounted DeWalt. I will attach the Y belts and conduit soon, hopefully tomorrow!