CNC 3020 Enclosure/Upgrade

[Pointy]

I added the mounting holes to the front panel and printed the whole thing out. I then cut out the holes with a scalpel to double check sizes and layout. I am please to report that everything fitted nicely. I know there are essentially just 4 rectangles + 33 holes to make, and I could do these myself but I really would like to make a proper job of the front panel, especially after all the time I have spent on this project. I also managed to make a right hash of the back panel when using a jigsaw and file. As Jazz made the generous offer of cutting the front panel FOC, I would be stupid not to take him up on the offer. I have suggested he just drill all holes at 3mm as I have a reasonable set of step drills. This should make it easier and quicker for Jazz (I know his machine time is limited) and it will also mean I have some work to do on the panel, which hopefully means it wont feel like cheating so much.

I have also located a suitable hole cutter which will allow me to cut the holes in the side panels for the cooling fans, and rather fortunately it's just a few miles down the road.

I need to get my finger out and finish the motor and limit switch rewiring so I can get the machine up and running again. It would be really nice if I could do that, get the side panels cut, fit the cooling fans and get the front panel in the post to Jazz, by the end of the week. This would then be a massive step towards finishing this project.

[Pointy]

I had a productive day today and got pretty much everything done.

I finished the motor & limit switch rewiring. I cut the holes and mounted the cooling fans. They were incredibly noisy at 24v so I am running them off 12V from the PC. I also fitted the 24v LED strips and wired them up. I moved the charge pump board over a little to give me a nice space for the HID PCB when I make it. Lastly I fitted most of the top aluminium profile and tidied up the PC wiring.

I will try and take some more pictures tomorrow.

[Pointy]

One thing I didn't mention is that at some point, my X axis started making a weird high pitch whining noise as soon as power was applied. I thought it was the bad wiring, but after the rewire it was still doing it. After swapping things around it seems which ever axis is plugged into the X stepper driver makes the noise. I woke up this morning with an idea of what is causing it and sure enough I was right. (Isn't it weird that you can go to bed with a problem and wake up with a solution?)

Anyway if you look at the schematic for my bob, detailed in this thread, you will see that parallel port 14 is used for X and A enable. I was using this pin for my charge pump output, so it was being pulsed at 12.5khz, which explains the noise. A quick pin swap has sorted that out but....

I assumed the purpose of the enable output was so that the motor didn't move without this signal being high. There was never a mention of setting pin 14 as an output in the original manual, so why does the X axis work without this set up in Mach3?