Well, another disappointing weekend with plasma. This thing is so frustrating, I really don’t know how to get it to finally work…
A reminder of the story: I tried for the first time a few months ago and the Arduino blew up instantly after the torch fired for the first time. Never had the time or the motivation to give it a try again until this weekend.
What I’ve done this time:
-Linking all tubes together, using some copper braided wire
-Attach this to the ground, together with the plasma ground
-Put the Arduino/ramps in a carton box, covered with several layers of aluminum tape (I had no metallic case available for this around)to create a Faraday cage
-Attach this box to the ground together with the others
-Put the plasma cutter as far as possible from the Arduino, and put the torch wires away from the motor wires as much as I could
Results:
-First attempt: normal configuration: the arduino is powered from the 220V (through the 12V power supply of course), the torch is fires from the relay. It started just fine, so I was super excited, cut a few letters from my test file, then crapped out suddently, the Arduino restarted… No damage to the arduino, I made a few other attempts but none of them was successful, the arduino kept restarting or acting weird
I thought it could be some interferences in the relay, so my next move was to disconnect it and try to control the plasma cutter using the manual switch.
Again, it started just fine, cut a few letters and then crapped out the same way.
So, I thought it could be a power supply issue, and decided to power the arduino and steppers through a scooter battery.
Same result, worked fine for a while, then stopped.
I tried several times using the battery, and at some point I guess something died in the electronics, the screen displays the startup logo and then blinks at a high frequency.
I really need some expert opinion here, I really cannot find out what is going on. I don’t want to give up on plasma, cuz it could be super useful in the shop.
This really puzzles me… Apparently it is not because of the relay, and not because of the power supply. I wonder what it could be… Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Here is the setup, the plasma cutter is on the right, the control box on the left of the machine, connected to the battery:
[attachment file=43097]
The Arduino is inside this box:
[attachment file=43098]
The results:
[attachment file=43106]
It doesn’t look very good, but I think that is because the plate I was using was pretty warped, so a lot of spots were too far. But the spots who were at the correct distance are actually very clean. Anyway, tweaking up to improve the quality is not the biggest concern right now, I need to come up with a way to make this work reliably, and if possible more than 10 seconds…
[attachment file=43107]
[attachment file=43108]
