I built myself a plasma table a couple years ago and with enough googling I finally found this place and got a blackbox from OpenBuilds. It worked great for a long time! I moved the table about 9 months ago and I'm finally trying to fire it up and I'm having problems. I can load g code and run the program with the plasma cutter off and it runs fine. As soon as I turn the plasma cutter on, I try to run a program and it moves to the first pierce point, plasma cutter fires, computer loses connection from black box and the table stops moving, but the cutter remains on and I have to flip the switch on the machine. I'm a novice to this stuff. What would you suggest I try?
I just tried loading openbuilds control on my wife's macbook and it's doing the same thing. I can manually select to turn the plasma on from OBControl and it immediately looses USB connection when the torch fires. With the plasma cutter turned off the program runs like it should. I have a new double shielded USB cable being delivered in the am. I am using a different one than I was using when the machine was working. That's the only thing that's really changed.
Now to add to the frustration, it's working intermittently. I cut 2 small files successfully after changing nothing and my 3rd file dropped signal mid cut.
you should make sure all your cabling is shielded and grounded.. Eventhough Primeweld Cut60 is blowback start, there is a lot noise in a Plasma cutter
follow all the EMI prevention things in the documentation docs:blackbox-x32:faq-emi [OpenBuilds Documentation]