Now that Milly is a fixture in the Build Space, it was time for phase two of the setup - adding the CNC capabilities in! We'd rustled up an old PC (do you know how difficult it is to get a computer with a parallel port new?!) and did a quick refresh of the operating system, and decided to go plug it in. Click Back after viewing an image.
Of course it might have been handy to have installed the cabling before putting Milly in place, but no big deal - it didn't take long to attach the serial cables to the motors, and run a parallel cable under the bench.
Here's the old clunker we dug out and [almost] dusted off. An old Lenovo something-or-other, with a gig of RAM and a 2.4GHz dual core CPU. We went more for robustness than aesthetics this time. It took all night last night to reinstall the O/S and then clear all the pre-installed junk off it, but now it's ready to rock.
Not a great photo, but at this point we're ready to fire up the CAD software for the first time. The software is called Mach3, and came with the mill, apparently with configuration files already set up, so this should be pretty easy!
For the first time, we turn the mystical bottom switches - controller power on the left, and stepper motor engage on the right. It was an exciting moment, as we went over to the PC and entered our first command: G0 X-2 ... and nothing happened. Zip. So then came a half an hour of checking connections, checking the setup instructions, and finally we checked the motor setup in the configuration file, to find everything was disabled - huh?! It took another five minutes to realize that the pre-configured 'profile' file had a space between the filename and extension, so when we were starting the CAD software it was generating a new, blank, profile file. Geez computers can be picky! After a quick bit of renaming we finally were ready to reissue the command:
And there was much rejoicing! For a while we investigated the various menus, and experimented with G codes to see what they would do. We even started getting fancy:
Having gotten the basics sorted out, we wrapped up the configuration by plugging in our backlash values (0.005" and 0.006") and wrapped up for the evening, plotting and scheming as to what crazy things we'd be able to do now ...
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