Just a couple of notes following on from previous post, the material being used for the tests is a soft twin layer engraving plastic and a 3mm engraving “D” bit. Cheap ebay purchases which i will use until confident on the process, then move to alloy/milling cutters.
The main problem i encountered was a sudden drop of data to the machine. This resulted in either halting the machining or just missing lines to be engraved.
Looking on the net it seems that engraving motor noise corrupting the signals to the steppers can be a problem.
So i rotated the board 180deg on the back of the machine, this enabled me to route the motor wire away from all stepper wires. The length of the motor wire was three times the length required, therefore this will be shortened. The rerouted wire seems to have solved the problem, we will see.
The depth of cut, for me, has been the most difficult to gauge, as you can see from the image on the previous post. The control software(GrblGru) allows you to set a total depth and incremental depths/passes. I tended to go too deep at first causing the cutter to dig in. After some further tests I have started to get some decent results.
The grbl version supplied on the board has been updated to the latest version. This was downloaded from the web and loaded using a program supplied on the machine CD(xloader). This update is required by some third party software.
Now moving on to some slightly more complicated dxf files.
GrblGru screen image shown below.
Great fun, keep safe.