Some time ago I purchased a "Profiler" PCB bridge mill from Elektor/Colinbus (http://www.elektor.com/extra/profiler-milling-machine-from-a-kit.91274.lynkx). At less than a third the price of a professional machine this kit looked like a good deal. However you get what you pay for. I like a number of other people who bought this kit found there were a few problems with it. For me it kept plunging through the board, the drill entry board and then tried moving, sending shards of carbide all over the place. also the PCB material I had wasn't completely flat so it would engrave too deep in some areas and too shallow or not at all in other areas. Other problems included the software being generally annoying, the spindle motor bearings being slack and out of alignment and the thing wanting to talk over a serial port in a non standard format.
Needless to say it has been gathering dust. What I wanted to do was whip out the old processor board and put in a new one, get a new spindle motor, design and make a floating head, design and make an auto tool hight gauge and write new control software. However one thing that would be needed for a rebuild would be something to generate the isolation routing tool paths from eagle (http://www.cadsoftusa.com/) layouts. I happened across a ulp programme from http://pcbgcode.org/ which dose exactly this. Now all I need to do is all the other things on the list.
I had previously bought a Kress spindle motor and clamping bracket so that is one problem taken care of. Having just obtained a Sieg X3 manual mill I can now make things properly and a floating head and tool length detector will be coming soon.
That just leaves the control board and all the software to be written.
To start I removed the old processor board and replaced it with an Arduino. I found that a USB port is perfectly sized to replace a D9- sub connector and a little saddle clamp made from a piece of ABS holds the board in place nicely.
To start I removed the old processor board and replaced it with an Arduino. I found that a USB port is perfectly sized to replace a D9- sub connector and a little saddle clamp made from a piece of ABS holds the board in place nicely.
Having done that I then wrote some a simple G code interpreter to run on the Arduino which i shall make the subject of my next post.
interesting I found that for reasons best explained by the bloke who designed this thing the step rate is 133 and 1/3 steps per mm on all three axes. go figure! (3mm pitch lead screws and 1.8deg/step motors running from a half stepping controller.)
interesting I found that for reasons best explained by the bloke who designed this thing the step rate is 133 and 1/3 steps per mm on all three axes. go figure! (3mm pitch lead screws and 1.8deg/step motors running from a half stepping controller.)
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