When it comes to the power brick for the electronics, are folks mounting that on the gantry itself? I am thinking that I should keep the weight down, there is going to be some cable / hose drag anyway, but the length of the wires going to the plug seem short.
If I had something going full length, then the hose can float, but the wires going to the outlet need to be snag free and not heavy with 4 - 8 feet of play.
Thinking of adding a U shaped block made of wood to one of the sides and zip tie or otherwise mount the brick there, use an extention cord for something to plug things into and just have one cord to the outlet. Would it better to mount it higher or lower? Or is there some other way of doing it?
My table is roughly about 4x4 usable size so I just mounted the brick to the frame of my table down low at about the midpoint and there is enough length for it to travel to both ends.
Thanks for the replies, what with folks hanging things from the ceiling didn’t really have any pics I could distinguish the bottom part of the low rider 2 with, or if there was some sort of consensus of what just worked.
To define it:
I have 110V, 12V and 5V to source (pi), equidistant if possible to keep cords short and managable, so center under the table somewhere, I have a scrap table that is maybe 5 feet long, I am starting with, plan to go 8. There are intrinsic lengths that cannot be avoided, length of the power brick and cords coming and going. I want to control the power with a switch, but leave the 5V line on for the pi or do some sort of ups add on for it. There are parts that make sense to have them go on a ride-along, so the wires are local for the motors, also the pi needs to be close so that goes along too. My goal is to have one power cord going to the outlet, one switch.
Thoughts so far:
Receptacle at the far end with switch, run the mess along in a line to the center, so brick, buck converter, regular outlet or extension cord wire. Or, since I have to have so much going on under the hood anyway, just power the pi independently rather than use the buck converter.
Stuck to one of the table legs. Wire to the board is an 8 foot piece of speaker wire.
Here’s the X stepper wire and power for the router attached to the dust collector hose.
Here you cam see the half box I made for my electronics. The 12VDC comes in from the bottom. And goes to a 5V dc to dc converter, which powers the pi. It also goes to a switch, and then to the controller. The power for the router comes from the floor. My LR isn’t full size, so it doesn’t move enough for me to worry about it.
I notice you are powering the pi using the power pins on the header, good to know that is an option that works. Also, it seems we have a similar length blue cable, except I have to use the OTG micro usb adapter with the pi zero w (testing to see how far that gets me). I am thinking of going mostly zip ties for mounting things, finding m3 nuts is nuts, I think I cleared out the metric section of Kent’s.
Using the jumper pins bypasses the pi power filter. You can solder to the pins on the back of the microusb too. That would be the same as using usb for power. But I am careful with this adjustable power supply, and I hope it does a decent job at filtering. But the internets thinks you’ll be living dangerously if you use something like the 5V from a wall wart through the header pins.
I added some pics to my other thread. You will notice the shorter usb c cable, I decided to do the fiddly soldering to shorten it up, and added a ton of heat shrink tubing.
