What type of wire is recommended for the moving parts on a CNC router? The wiring that runs through the drag chains. At work I have used "extra-flex" a special festoon cold temperature flexible wire. Is anything other than basic stranded wire needed? Is there a capacitance or inductance rating required for the stepper motors or stepper drives to control board due to the high frequencies?
Yes but what strand count would be considered continuous flex cable vs plain old stranded wire. Or does it matter?
I used this for my motors and it works great. It is 18 gauge 4 wire stranded and shielded. They sell it by the foot in the store. There is a two wire version I used for the limit switches. OpenBuilds sells wire for about the same price is the stuff from Home Depot. Xtension Wire
I will check the next time I am out there, but I believe there was a drain wire. I bought the shielded wire for protection from noise so my limit/homing switches wouldn't trip unexpectedly. I even bought optocouplers and the rest of the parts to include milling the PCB to make the connections as per the GRBL limit switch wiki but in three years of use, I have never bothered to finish hooking them all up. My ADHD got me, I guess. Most things I make are one-off (or maybe 2 or 3) parts out of stock that is a little larger than I need and I just manually home it to the center of the work piece using a paper template so I know the cutting area will fit inside my stock. A video of a part being made with this process is located here. Someday I will finally hook them up.
