Wobblycogs CNC Mk2

[Wobblycogs]

Yes, I was quite pleased with the latency. Looking at the machine spec I'd forgotten quite how good it was, massive overkill for a control box I know but it was sitting around not doing anything. In fact it's been switched off for so long the BIOS battery needs replacing. I'll replace that and re-run the latency test to confirm the result.

The machine is:

Motherboard: GA-K8NXP-SLI
Processor: Athlon 64 3000+ (not sure which revision, I think it's a 130nm ClawHammer as I bought it quite soon after they were released)
Memory: 3GB DDR400
Video Card: some old nVidia card, can look it up if you're interested.

Initially I was getting a latency of about 50,000ns but I noticed that was caused by a spike when I first played sound through the on-board sound card. Disabling the on-board sound in the BIOS gave me a 7000ns. After performing all the package updates the system required I re-ran the tests and got around 6500ns. I also tried the nVidia binary drivers to see if that would improve video performance - bad idea, whenever anything using OpenGL started it caused a 250,000ns spike in jitter!

I hear what you are saying regarding running direct from the parallel port. Would you also recommend the PMDX-126 as a nice BOB?

[Wobblycogs]

I've been a bit busy with work for the last couple of months hence the lack of posts but the build has moved forward a bit. I've now got the steppers, drivers, screws, nuts, bob, nut brackets, spindle, VFD and a few other bits and bobs as well.

I met up with Neil the other night to swap parts from a joint buy and he kindly gave me a bit of 10mm plate to have a practice with. When I first saw it my heart sank - it looked distinctly too thin to build a machine from. I thought I'd give it a crack anyway and build one of the 8 brackets that I plan on using to support the X-axis and here's the results:


The angle from the base to the back is 89.7 deg which I'm fairly pleased with considering this is my first attempt at metal work. It's surprisingly strong but is it strong enough? The the parts we first roughly jigsawed (or hand sawn once the jigsaw blade gave up) and then cut to exact size on the mitre saw. The accuracy is ok but not exactly the perfection I had envisioned. I'll have to decide now whether to get some kind soul to mill the parts for me or to press on with trying to cut the pieces myself.