And so it begins… RIP LR3.
Managed to tear down my LR3 and get most of my LR4 assembled today (No pic of assembly process because I don’t think of these things beforehand lol.) Tomorrow will be wire routing and assembling gantry to end plates. Pretty straightforward and painless upgrade!
It’s the moment the build starts it always feels super real and exciting! Good luck with your build! Looking forward to seeing it!
Mostly finished assembly the other day and thought I should take some glamour shots! I still need to screw down my Y-Rail, finalize belt mount positioning, and set my endstop limits, but the hard part is pretty well done.
I went with a matte blue and black colour scheme and I’m pretty satisfied with the results. Something I noticed is the “Peter Plates” make a great surface for screw mounting if you set your infill percentage high enough. This should help with additions such as the M5 Dial mount. I don’t have magnets in my case so I needed to use the angled cradle instead of Doug’s new design. I plan on adding the holder for collets and collet wrenches as well.
In this image you can see one iteration of a modification I designed for the Z-Probe connection. I made a magnetic, interlocking connector which has reversed magnets to ensure correct orientation. On the router side you can see two contact pads for signal and ground for the probe.
Here’s the two sides of the connector while it was installed on my LR3. The opposite side of the connector has two “pogo” spring pins which contact the pads when the magnetic connector engages. I personally did not like the idea of having to try and tuck my probe and the wires away somewhere on the core with the potential of getting caught in the machine somehow, whether the X-drive assembly or the spindle itself. With this modification, I can simply attach my probe assembly, do my probing, then quickly and easily remove the entire assembly.
I plan on designing a more refined version which uses these Amazon.ca connectors which I will release as soon as I can.
I have published the files for my V1 Magnetic Z-Probe Connector on Printables:
Hopefully I will have the more refined version up before long, but I thought I would at least make this available in the meantime if people are interested.
Your build looks really nice! What is the working area?
Thanks! It’s a full sheet 49” x 97” machine
Looks great! Is there a reason why you mounted the Y rail side lower? By default the design has the gantry parallel with the work surface, and includes the height of the Y rail., so I’m curious about that. (edit: oh I think I see, you are still planning to plane a strip to get it raised up? )
I really like the magnetic probe mount, really cleans it up!
Yeah that was a mistake lol. When building the machine it appeared that the X-Max side was too high, so I removed one of the strips of MDF. I didn’t realize it was designed to compensate for this offset with the XZ plates. t I was just looking at it weird I guess and I ended up replacing the piece I removed.
Yeah, that asymmetry was an interesting change from the LR3!
thanks for jogging my thought process with your magnetic connector… I actually forgot to get the probe from V1E so I ran some wires through the core… but totally forgot that on my MPCNC Primo, I used a 2 pin jack plug on my cabinet and I could disconnect or leave it attached but never on the core/machine itself. Now that I saw your post, I’ll probably will put similar panel mount on board box where I can just plug in probe wire when I need to use it.
That’s not a bad idea either! My mind was focused on the quick disconnect aspect like a Macbook “MagSafe” connector.
It actually saved me once already! I had a config issue with my control board after an update. It caused the spindle to turn on as soon as the probe cycle was complete. This is obviously quite dangerous, as the positive probe lead was still attached to the spindle, and my hand was still holding the probe in place on the work piece. Because of this magnetic connection however, I was able to quite literally rip the cords out of the way as quickly as possible without causing damage. Not a situation I had anticipated (obviously), but having this in place helped mitigate the danger to a degree.
check to see if your spindle has continuity between the body and the collet. Then you can hook one side to the body (sandwich in one of the clamps) and then just use a single magnet for the other wire.
Another great idea! You could reduce the number of magnets down to only one or two this way.
Looking awesome!!
LED’s installed 
still need to figure out the button controls to have the Jackpot tell the LED controller to change presets depending on the current operation, but at least it looks pretty cool for now.
Ryan figured it out here…
Yeah that’s the post I was going off of (my comment was the last on that post actually). There seems to be a miscommunication somewhere between the Jackpot and WLED currently however. I had the macros set up correctly on the Jackpot, and could see that the indicator light for the GPIO I was using was lighting up and blinking to correspond to a short, long, or double button press when the macro was activated. I suspect it has to do with button press lengths on the Jackpot side of things or something on the WLED config side of things. WLED expects the button to be pressed for a certain length of time to be considered a “short press” or a “long press”. So should just be a matter of figuring out button timings and playing around with the WLED config a bit more to get the two boards talking. This is just where I left off for the day.
Reading further into the WLED button instructions there is mention of pulling the GPIO high to 3.3V with a 10K resistor. Think I’ll give this a shot and see what happens.
Figured it out. Wrote a little more detail on the “Jackpot + Wled” thread.
