Various ramblings – Electronics, Radio, 3D Printing & CNC
While working on my 3D printer I noticed that a significant amount of heat was radiated out the bottom of the heated bed, a quick search confirmed that this was something noticed by many others. In the various discussions online I found that it was fairly common for people to insulate their heated beds in an effort to improve heating...
While work and other commitments have been sapping a large amount of my time I have been making slow progress with the milling of circuit boards for the 6502 computer project. I have added some pictures of progress below. I am slowly getting the hang of repeatable and reliable results on the mill. Most trouble stems from the height at...
After much tweaking, fiddling and procrastinating I have finally been able to successfully mill a PCB! The only minor issue I had was with the drill file created by the PCB-GCode script which would not load correctly into LinuxCNC. Luckily this is a step that I can complete manually using my PCB drill. The results are excellent, the finish is...
While waiting patiently for the mill to finish running a PCB isolation route job I stepped away for a few seconds to skip a song on my music playlist. As I was fiddling with the music I heard the spindle motor starting to bog down and turned around to see that the cutting tool had started cutting deeper and deeper...
A few pictures of a test run trying out isolation PCB routing. GCode was generated using the PCB-Gcode script for Eagle, using the backplane board from my 6502 project as input. Part way through the run I noticed that the mill was slightly out of alignment on the X-axis, this was causing shallow track cuts which got progressively worse the further...
Some pictures of the finished mill and the first cuts of my own design. Prior to this I had done some test cuts using the default “LinuxCNC” logo, the very first cut was actually flipped on the Y-axis… Configuration fail!
Another one of those cool “toys” I thought I would never be able to afford but lusted after all the same. With the availability of cheap stepper motors, driver circuits and free software (LinuxCNC), CNC mills are starting to become quiet affordable for home use. Of course there are limitations. Just like my lathe this mill is only a baby,...
While working on a small PIC project as an addition to a larger project (a JUMA RX1 DDS LSB/CW receiver) I had the displeasure of using Microchip’s IDE MPLAB. MPLAB looks like it was designed in the mid-90’s, and while it does let you piece together code and compile it into PIC compatible hex, it’s not the most user friendly...