Category: IndyMill CNC-en

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Indymill increased working space and stability Y-axis

2021 05 13: Yesterday I received the iron plates for my Indymill from Nikodem Bartnik, and it was all very well packed and quickly delivered!

As I always do on any build, I first check the separated axis for best fit and possible improvements. I started with the Y-axis.  In the below picture, the left side of the macine is shown, being the left Y-axis.  The rest of the machine is not yet attached.

This is how I started with the original design. Ball bearing block (orange) and screw mount (red) are both 3dprinted here.

The Y-axis is somewhat limited in its drive towards the rear of the Indymill CNC machine, due to the bridge plate for the X-axis.  This bridge plate is blocked in its movement towards the rear because it hits the bearing block (orange part) that holds the ballscrew in place. By removing a small and unused part of the bridge plate, the movement can get about 6 cm extended towards the rear.  The pictures are attached to this post, please see how I made this.

Maximum movement towards the rear (top in the picture) due to a removed piece of the bridge plate

I used the plasma cutter to cut the parts out of the 6mm steel plates and after this was done, I used the lamel grinder to make it smooth.  Although I used a guiding rail for cutting, the power was apparantly a bit too much so it is not a very beautiful cut… -)  No worries because all still fits very well.

BK12 original axial bearing (black) for 1605 ballscrew and -nut (red) with Nema23 holder (orange) with an attachment for the original BK12 bearing, both placed on the left Y- axis of the IndyMill CNC
An original nut holder for a 1605 ball screw nut, machined down on my manual mill to fit the Indymill’s Y-axes
The nut holder in place on the left Y axis
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Indymill iron hardware treatment

The required iron plates were not available in ready- to use state at the time I needed this, fortunately I could buy the plates as a kit with all of the drilled holes already in it, non-painted.  And- all of the thread tapping still needed to be done.   Since I am also making changes to the design of the millling machine,  some holes will be altered and this is best done when the plates are not yet painted.

The raw streel for the Indymill.  I put small colored circles  where the thread needs to be tapped.

Rustpreventing primer spray-painted the Indymill’s iron plates

 

 

 

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Indymill CNC Nema23 with sensorless homing on Mellow Fly-CDY2

After configuring the reprap Mellow FLY-CDY-V2 motherboard for CNC including the webinterface and installing Mellow’s TMC2209 driver units I got  sensorless homing setup for the Indymill.

It took a lot of time to get it all tuned, as the 3 axes act entirely different due to their different inertia.  The weight that is carried is obviously higher for the Y- than for the X axis.  And the 4 kilogram weighing spindle engine made it pretty difficult to get the Z axis tuned.

The resulting config file is provided in this post.  Use this with caution, since every machine is different, and the used stepper motors, cabling, steppers and PSU all have influence on the CNC’s behaviour and thus on the config settings.

To have the original Mellow FLY TMC2209 drivers work with sensorless homing, set the underneath dip switch to ON

(Diag pin will then be connected).  It took me some time to find out that this is different than other TMC2209 drivers, where the Diag pin is activated by jumper settings on the motherboard.  No idea what happens when you use non-Fly TMC2209’s on the Fly board, but I expect this will not work for sensorless homing.

What I experience on the Y axis is that if you have real problems with homing or skipping steps, the steel Y carriage plates may bend and cause a non-square Y carriage that will never align any more.  I repaired this but preventing is better.

GO TO THE INDYMILL & Reprap Driver POST 

Since this setup with sensorless homing never gave me good speed ratings, I disassembled this setup and continued with endstop setup.  If you want to know how to setup sensorless homing with reprap, please look at my sensorless homing setup on my dual carriage 3d printer, where this works perfect!

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Indymill CNC with GRBL Mega256 RAMPS1.4 shield and LCD

This is my test setup for a 1.4 RAMPS shield on top of an Arduino Mega with TMC2209 drivers, optical endstops and individually homing of dual Yaxes PLUS an LCD that shows the exact XYZ locations anytime.

Firstly, I must admit that this option was initially NOT on my list bacause I felt this was a pure hobby-like option.  BUT- as my requirements list grew and other options got less and less, I ordered a Ramps 1.6 shield and plugged one of my Mega2560 boards under it.  Then- the search began to get a working fork of GRBL for arduino that both accomodated the Mega 2560 and my requirements list.  On this list: GRBL, Squaring my gantry, LCD with useful data, Handwheel connection, Preconfigurable buttons on the handwheel (stop, define as zero, probe here, et cetera).  The fork that does this all is: GRBL-Mega-edge.  The last comment is of April, 2020 and the fork was updated last in 2019.  But- it works straight out of the box and the documentation is very well maintained. 

Since it works under the Arduino IDE and has its own library, I foresee little problems in the future.  Everything is freely configurable and it might even be possible to put an Arduino Due in place of the Mega2560 in this setup, with some tweaking of pins and speeds.    And- tweaking is required for the hardware as well. The Ramps boards were never designed for 24 Volts, so this needs to be taken care of.  One might of course use 12 Volts and use external driver modules, but I intend to keep everything very small and make use of an external PSU, and a small handwheel-like box for the Mega2560, Ramps, drivers, LCD, buttons and handwheel knob.  By the way: For getting my designs I already had from my 3d printer background towards the CNC I bought Estlcam (CAM program). This really does a great job at converting it to Gcode and sending it to my Grbl- Mega 2560/RAMPS setup.

Afterthoughts 2021-06-22:  When connecting Estlcam to the Mega2560 and RAMPS1.6 shield, Estlcam can program the RAMPS / Mega2560 configuration, including dual X and Y axis.  This works straight out of the box including endstops. Actually this is easier than first compiling GRBL on RAMPS with Arduino’s compiler.  BUT- it seems that autosquaring does either not work or I did not install Estlcam’s options correctly since the endstops on the dual axis appear to function in parallel instead of indicvidually per axle.

24 Volts connecting is not possible on a RAMPS shield just like that. I removed D1 and powered the Mega2560 with a 9 Volts PSU, and the shield seperately with 24 Volts.  For the Arduino DUE, dedicated RAMPS boards are already available (Smart ramps that compensates for the 3.3 volts in/out Voltage of the Arduino Due)!.

Another option for Estlcam is to program the Mega2560 without RAMPS shield and connect everything directly to the Mega2560 with jumpers.  If this is done, Estlcam will do the bare programming of the Mega and Estlcam can steer almost everything.  Since I bought a license for Estlcam I will, at a later stage, try this as well.  SEE THIS POST

 

 

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