First of all saying that I have my LR4 machine and table built now and I tested the basics of moving along the different axes and go to homing position and everything seems to work fine which is not short of amazing. So thanks a lot for the amazing project and documentation. It says something that Im a total dumbass and without help I managed to get to this stage.
There are some small things that are still a bit cloudy in my head and I couldnt really find a clear solution for them. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction:
I built the machine without a touchplate. I guess as many other people as ordering to the v1 shop was prohibitive in terms of cost and saw in the documentation that is optional I decide it to leave it “for laters“. Now the machine is built but I see that tutorials are made accounting for a touchplate being there. I even found a post on someone that also buiolt without the touchplate and that means that the program start gcode needs to change in that case. Is there an easy way to add a touchplate at this stage? Cause I guess the cable for it needs to be routed through the core all along the x axis to the controller box, same as the router power cable and the other core and Y1 cables.
What would mean not having a touchplate? That I need to manually bring the machine to the 0,0,0 in X Y and Z (so touching the board im gonna cut) before starting the cut operation?
Related to the touchplate and startup procedure is still unclear to me what kind of initial setup calibration needs to be done before every cutting operation. Do we need to set the router at a certain position before starting?Will the controller do it on its own? I can see the start sequence contains “G10 L20 P0 X0 Y0 Z0 (set current location to zero, survives reboot)”
Do we need to do an squaring operation? or thats just only once after building the machine.
I saw in the GCode that part of the start/end sequences include a start spindle command (for pin27). Does that mean that I was supposed to connect somehow the router to the pin27 of the controller box? Did I miss something on the instructions? I havent been able to find anything related to this. I even wouldnt know how to do this. The router I got is a Makita RT0702C and it has on it a conventional switch to turn on and a rotary for the speed setting.
Also I forgot to ask this but, If i want at this point to attach a pen to do the crown test…. I see the adapters for pen are intended to be used instead of the router. But disassembling the router at this stage would be a mess as the power cord is bundles with the rest of the core cables , caught by cable ties and so on. Is there another way someone knows about to attach a pen?
Basically yes. Before every cut you need to let the machine know where is 0,0,0 point. So you can just jog (move) machine to the point you marked as 0 when generating gcode file, go down with a bit to be more or less touching the material, and set all to zero.
With touch plate you can ask your machine to do the Z axis for you - you just attach cable to the router bit, put plate (it can be anything metal really) on the material and run gcode which will make machine to move slowly down until it “feels” metal plate on the table. Then it sets Z to zero at that spot, and usually move up lil bit.
I made my touch plate from aluminum business card they are great, in my opinion, coz they are very thin
EDIT:
oh, and two more things:
welcome to the community!
your partner is going to make you feel pain when they come home and find cnc in the kitchen…
There is the initial calibration when you build it, but each time you start it up or run a job, you’ll want to home all the axes. That will re-square using the pulloffs set on the Y and Z motors. That will zero the machine coordinates. Then for the job, you’ll jog to the XY position you want based off the origin set in CAM. In your case without the touch plate, you’ll need to jog Z to the top of the workpiece (assuming CAM is setup that way). From there, you will zero the machine with an G10 command which will set the work coordinates to zero.
This is an optional feature that you do not need. You can use this with a relay to turn the router on and off, however, this doesn’t work will all routers due to soft start not liking this.
