Is it safe to shorten the cables that Openbuilds sells. I have a ton of excess with the end stops and motor cables on my 1510. Its making my cable management a nightmare. Anyone know what the pit falls may be?
Certainly is safe, just make sure to do the connections properly (no shorts, no loose terminals, no wires stripped back to far that become a future risk of shorting)
Interference gets worse the longer the cables- more RF coupling (ie. antenna) and/or AC inductive coupling, more voltage drop (less signal). Shortening them is theoretically best practice. Just remember to keep enough slack that you can move things, open cabinet doors, unplug things, etc.
Great to know on shortening, I can get it nice and tidy. While we are talk'in cable management, right now I have a power strip running through an E stop that kills everything, vac, router, and BB in one fail swoop. Is connecting the E-stop to the door plug a better option. Could I kill/damage the BB this way. Its working great but I'm concerned killing power could cause damage to the board. Any thought would be super helpful.
Killing power is best practice. Because an emergency could be anything. If the power supply is on fire, sending a Pause signal to the controller won't help (;
That's not the way many of us do it, but it's the way Peter likes it and is technically the safest option. A door plug should be connected to pin A1, ie. feed hold- you don't want the entire thing to fail catastrophically if all you do is open the door to move something out of the way. No reason it should damage the board, but E-stop is not feed hold and shouldn't be used as such.
Right, I inferred that- you can have a feed hold and start/resume hardware switches, assuming the BlackBox has IO for both, I do on my grbl-based laser, nothing wrong with that. They can be handy if you need to pause quickly for something fairly minor without the machine losing position.
We do not, and also it is a "feature" slated for removal in Gnea Grbl's coming releases (Moving buttons to SPI/I2C based HALs)
Killing power would stop all feed until I kill the job in OBC. That is the only thing not on power strip. It kills all movement until I cancel or pause job. That way it keeps Zero and I stand a chance continuing the job if its something like crashing into clamp or screw down or anything like that.
I think for know I will keep it the way I have it. I'm happy with the way it functions as long as I'm not damaging my BB. Thanks guys!
If you crashed, you probably already lost position. Setup Homing, rehome, Zero offset is stored in EEPROM, and re-established by rehoming after recovering from the crash
Any input on how to handle Bit changes mid job. I use Estlcam and If I cant probe my Z while its paused what are my options. I don't know much about Gcode so I'm kind of stuck. Sorry to lump this in with the cable question but I'm curios how OBC handles it.
I am referring to your section below. It would not have Kept Zero if you crashed into the clamp Coming in the medium term / early next year is Toolchanges · Issue #26 · OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CONTROL For now, split each tool into its own Gcode file (Our fusion post, Vectric, etc does that for you)
Yes crash equals lost steps. Impending crash I should say! Coming from the 3d printing world lost steps is a very painful reality. Ha Ha!! That's great on the tool changer. I can keep UGS in my back pocket for tool change jobs until then!! Me and Fusion aren't getting along right now. I love it it for modeling but the manufacturing side has given me fits (G2/G3). I'm a fan of Estlcam for now. Thanks for all your input today.
Are you using Estlcam to control the machine? If so, the machine pauses for tool changes. You turn off the spindle, change the tool, re-zero the Z and continue the job. Just remember to re-zero the z. If not, you may be like me and end up cutting through 1/4 inch aluminum plate at full depth which, surprisingly actually worked with a 1/4 endmill for a while until I hit the pause button. I was tempted to try it a little slower and ramping in.
I'm not currently controlling my machine with Estlcam. Though I intend to give it a try when I can. I'm using OBC and I just use shims to measure the bit at pause and then setting the next bit at the same shim height. Its a little clumsy but it works pretty dang good.
