I'd like to add a coolant temperature sensor to my build so that the program initiates a feed hold, shuts down the spindle, and raises the tool off the work piece, but keeps the coolant pump running. I'm wondering if anyone has done this, and it so, is the Black Box sufficient, or would I need to additionally utilize something like a Raspberry Pi? (Mods: wasn't sure if this belongs here or in General Electronics...)
Off the top of my head, I'd think you'd need an arduino or pi to monitor the temp and control the pump. It can communicate to the blackbox by simulating a limit switch trigger.
I'd use 0x84 Safety Door real time code with both parking and door input pin compile time options. You'll have to use some kind of intermediate interface to convert an analog sensor input into a trigger event, but if you have the input pin available (I don't know if the BB has the hardware by breakout or by board soldering, off-hand) then you can circumvent the need to jack into the serial stream, which is usually inconvenient (but might be possible if necessary by impersonating a HID to the control PC to send the keyboard-input ASCII (edit: or directly connecting to serial by using an Arduino as the monitor interface and spending most of its time not reading the sensor but making sure that it's listening for "ok" responses)).
Order a CW5000 chiller. The spindle will thank you. No worries about overheating with active chilling. Its alarm output is dry contact - can be used with Door input - for the real issues like a pipe leak etc stopping coolant flow
That's a good idea - better than my aquarium pump in a 5 gallon bucket. I have to run RV antifreeze insteead of water for the next few months because my shop is unheated (yet) and I'm at 6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevadas. We had that same model chiller at the makerspace out at our airport which wasn't really heated either in it's first few years and with some algicide the RVAF worked fine. Would you think that installing the chiller on our first laser up off the ground on a shelf at more or less the same height as the CNC deck would help the pump?
I should have searched the Resources section, as this post achieves more or less what I was originally asking about: Water Cooling Monitoring
