Wire EDM machine

[Neale]

Ah, design in retrospect - always the easiest approach! You are quite right, though, and one simple change has been to put a clear waterproof cover over the front panel, which should help. There are also covers over the rest of the electronics, partly to keep out fingers as well as water. No-one but an idiot would put a large open container of water directly over a heap of sensitive electronics... I remember once visiting a hotel that had just been closed - the swimming pool had developed a leak into the electrical plant room below, so we aren't the only ones. The real point, though, is that this was built as a proof of concept, something that would, if it worked, be able to do something demonstrably useful albeit on a small scale. If I admitted that the current controller can only accept designs that are something like 16K steps long, which equates to about 200mm cutting length, am I going to be nailed to the wall again? Extending that part is, again, just a matter of upgrading the front-end software and hardware. SMOP.

As for "standard gcode", I possibly did not explain myself very well. Normally, for example, you would design in, say, Vectric vCarve and use its CAM module to produce gcode aimed at specific motion control software - Mach3, say. Mach3 translates that gcode on the fly into steps which are sent to the stepper drivers. We design in Vectric vCarve and use its CAM to produce gcode. We use the grbl post-processor. To simplify the software running in the EDM machine micro-controller, we do the gcode to step translation in a separate application which runs on a PC. The step file is then downloaded to the machine. The work flow is very little different from, and the design stage is identical to, that used with the kind of machine that most people on this forum use. There is one extra step that we make explicit that most people do not see as it happens in the motion control software.

Use of Kflop or similar is a valid point, but we took a simpler approach. Our approach means tight coupling between spark generator and motion control at a spark-by-spark level. I suspect that this is one reason for the surprising rate of cut but this is a guess.