Today for the first time I attached all the motors to my cnc router. Below are a couple of time-lapse films of me tinkering with the system. At the moment the motors, particularly the x-axis are prone to stalling. a little encouragement by hand is enough to restart things but I suspect that I need to up the voltage to improve the torque. So far I’ve just used about 11V but I should in theory be able to take it up to 30V (though I don’t have a power supply that big right now)
Assuming I can overcome the stalling the next issue is the grbl config. I tested the homing cycle and it worked, however I don’t really understand it. The instructions seem to tally with what I’m seeing, I just don’t understand why it works that way. the homing cycle moves all the axis to their positive limit. for Z that means up and away from the workpiece which seems ok. Y pulls over to one side and X pushes to the front of the machine. All this is fine, but it leaves the machine at 0,0,0 with each access only able to move in the negative direction… but that is not how gcode comes out, it expects to move to positive points from 0,0,0 so I don’t really know why it doesn’t home to the negative limit. but I guess I’ll figure it out in time.
In all today was fun, I didn’t get as far as any real gcode test, I was just manually typing axis move commands enough to try and suss out what was working and how well. next time I will up the voltage and see if that stops the xaxis from stalling out. by then I’ll hopefully have figured out the homing thing, but failing that I can manually shift things to the right places to run some sample gcode.