I know there are several other WebFoots building these machines. Maybe we need a V1E Fair in the Willamette Valley!
My only requirement is that we do it in the late fall or early winter “wet season”. I’ve got waaaay to much to do when the weather gets good.
Mike
Thanks for the info. I ended up adding some 3/4" plywood under the mdf on the corners just in case. Build is coming along. I have the feet set, but realized I miss printing two bottom corners and two trucks. Ordering more pla and printing. I am really impressed by the tolerencing on the design. I am printing on two different printers, one with a 0.4mm nozzle and one with a 0.6mm nozzle. I have had to do very little post-processing to get things to fit.
Since I am building on a somewhat portable box, I am planning to use connectors on my control box so it can be separated from the box. At some point I may need to build something custom, but we will see.
Looks great, nice work, yours is gonna end up very sturdy indeed. For what it’s worth, my regret in rushing the build of the base isn’t one of strength but rather flatness. depending on whether you are going to surface your spoilboard and the kind of workholding you plan on, this may not be an issue, but figured I’d mention it can be a bit finnicky to get both surfaces of a torsion box totally flat, though I’m just admittedly not so meticulous with woodworking (milling is way more fun imo)
Another tip- print/cut/find a small “spacer” you can use to offset the feet in from the corners. I made sure my box was dead square on the diagonals, and when I installed the feet i just used an L-shaped plastic block to space the feet in from the corners evenly, and that made my build totally square from the start. Same goes if you use dual endstops, use a spacer to get them exactly the same distance from the corners. I haven’t experienced any of the accuracy issues others have mentioned, my rig has been nearly dead-on from the start due to the extra time taken to make sure my rails and endstops were as square as possible.
Thanks for the tips. My table was not perfectly square, but I was able to get the base as close as I can measure with a tape measure. I will definitely take my time with the end stops.
Wire management questions:
I see a lot of builds with drag chains and some with the mesh conduit. Preference here? If you are using drag chains, did you print them or buy them (links would be appreciated)?
Stafford,
I started with drag chains, and they were a bit of a challenge to string all the wiring through. I have bought them from Amazon and they were NOT the ones with a clip on top, which allows installing the wiring after routing the chains.
I later changed it to the Tape Measure trick which I found easier to install and required less added parts to the build.
I’ve been happy with that solution, but again you need to thread all the wires through at the first.
Mike.
Drag chains seemed spendy to me relative to the other parts, and the 3D printed ones always kinda seemed shitty - I have them on my 3D printers and they don’t really flow, they just kinda scrape along (not to mention would take forever to print a full batch).
I sleeved stepper wires and endstop wires separately and I designed some 3D printed clips mounted to the side of my torsion box to keep them situated all nice, that’s been plenty.
I reason that if wires wear or fail or disconnect it’s an annoying but inexpensive fix, and realistically you’d probably crack a printed part or loose up a bolt or have a bunch of other problems before you’d ever have to worry about a wire flexing too many times to failure…
For a portable system you definitely want a detachable control box though. I used aviation plugs like these:
I picked up a pack of 4 pin (steppers) and 2 pin (stops).
They’re a bit annoying to solder (definitely pre-tin the conductors) but I couldn’t really find a suitable alternative in the same price range. They won’t mount to anything over about 1/4" thick so I ended up printing some “plates” to mount them to for my milled control box.
Good progress so far. I have it all built and wired. I have been able to move all the axis in the correct directions using the LCD. I tested all the end stops and correct a swapped one. I homed the x-axis and it worked as expected. I tried to home the y-axis and it started to move towards home and then started shuttering. It works fine if I move it Y+ or Y- on the LCD, but when I try to home it does this. Any ideas?
Are you using endstops?
How did you initiate the homing, LCD, Repetier?
Yes, i have end stops. It was initiated from the lcd. It worked fine on x, but shuddered on the y. It moves fine for the full range if I use the jog on the lcd.
From the marlin side of the touch side? Try the other side, whichever you used. Did you try to home all or just an individual axis?
How long ago did you buy it from me? (what firmware number does the screen show on boot?)
When you run the homing from gcode, as shown on the milling basics page, does it work?
It is the current firmware. I have not connected repiteir yet, so I will try these ideas tomorrow.
If you can share what firmware the screen says we can also check if it is the correct one for your build.
A picture of your control board wired up is usually pretty helpful as well. You are having a uncommon issue so something is wrong, but we definitely need details to help get it sorted out.
Thanks for the help. It turns out it was a loose connection on the Y2 end stop. I was thinking about it wrong. I was thinking one may be shorted, but since they are normally closed an open connection looks like it is triggered. So one side triggered and the stepper stopped and the other side tried to keep going. I had tested them all and then put the lid on the box and did not retest. Something must have pulled on it when I reassembled.
Nice!
So it was actually grinding because one side wasn’t moving and it was trying to rip itself off the rails. That makes sense now.
Are there settings for the homing sequence in the firmware? It seems like with dual end stops if one gets triggered, it should stop before it travels too far (like 5mm or so) if the other end stop does not trigger. That way it won’t try to tear itself apart if there is a wiring issue or the end stops aren’t set correctly. I don’t see any parameters for this in the Marlin G28 reference.
No none that I know of.
On the other hand, in most cases you will always be standing right there so if there is an issue hit the panic button.
I have read several posts about setting the home position from the lcd, but I can’t figure out how to do it. I have just been entering the g92 command in the terminal. Anyone know where this is in the lcd?
Are you using the touch display or the Marlin version? In the marlin version there is a “V1 Custom Menu” that has a reset all coordinates. The touch screen doesn’t have that built-in as that display firmware occasionally “breaks” the old screen settings, or something like that. The V1 team chose to stop trying to keep up with BigTree updates.
The Marlin menus are managed by the team, in fact they haven’t needed to make changes there in quite a while (at least as far as Iknow).
Mike
I bought the touch display from V1 and I am using the firmware that was loaded on it.
