I know this isn't strictly CNC, but it's the same xy setup as a CNC.
Made these on my laser engraver for my kids today
First one on the left, last one on the right. They improve with each one I did
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Which Engraver? I guess it's probably one of the generic Chinese machines rather than one of your big f**k off expensive machines?
I bought one in August last year, but I ended up rather ill, so it got pushed to the back of "the west wing" (the cupboard under the stairs that you enter at your own peril), along with a Prusa MK3S I bought at the same time.
I did however do myself a favour at the time, the instructions contained everything numbered, but non of the actual bags of bits were numbered, so I sat there for hours finding each screw, bolt, nut, washer and so on and ticked everything off on the BOM. I was missing a few screws, and had extra ones which weren't on the list.
The machine I bought (3018 plus or something) I just wanted to be able to mark stuff, or drill holes in small bits of plastic, what I bought has a "500W" spindle (humn, yeah...) and 15mW laser.
Over the bank holiday last week, I finally built the 3D printer, took me a few days because I can't see properly these days, so ended up constantly taking my glasses on and off, and also because I have to go slow and steady otherwise I make mistakes really easy. Once I'd finished the build, I powered it up in trepidation, the first thing was that no magic smoke was emitted....a good start! The first couple of kit tests are the fans and then it checks the X-axis length....Nope, too short. Watched it a couple of times and it wasn't travelling the full length, looked at the back and some cable tie "bobbles" were pointing in the wrong direction and stopping the axis from going a few mm further.
Figured this was going to be the start of a long period of fault-finding, but it just kept going through every step as they came up, before finally telling me "everything is good". Ran one of the test files and it printed pretty well, a few more tweaks and I've got a pretty decent base setup on it now.
While I had the energy, I decided to put the engraver together, really glad I suffered the pain when it arrived by putting the numbers on the bags, made it a magnitude of time less to build than it would have.
Powered it up, just plugged the z-axis in first just to go through things one at a time. Z happily went up and down. Plugged in the other axes, and stepped Y....
RELEASE THE MAGIC SMOKE!
I've ended up in conversation with the vendor on Aliexpress, I send them footage of the smoke and the pictures of everything. I got the multimeter out and checked the coils on the motors, nothing bad happened to them. Looked at the back of the charred PCB and the X&Y connectors didn't match the board, the Z motor had a different pinout on it which did match the board, it was the only one that was wired correctly.
I've spent days telling them it was wired wrong and that the steppers themselves have different pinouts on the actual stepper motor themselves, this was more for my peace of time getting them to acknowledge that there was indeed a different pinout, but I couldn't get them to understand, they remained convinced that all the motors should be connected the same.
Today I took the charred board and powered it up again, one of the Y axes was very obviously dead, and when it died it also took out the X-axis driver, but the second Y and the Z drivers were still operational, I swapped over the pins and we were back in business!.
Just waiting on the replacement to arrive which I will be buzzing out checking every connector on it matches what is being plugged in.
In the meantime, I've printed a case for the pi + hyperpixel display for octodash and I didn't like the mounting options that were available, so I'm currently creating my own bracket in solidworks.