Pertneer's Blog

I added a calendar of places that I will be driving the Jeep. Please note that these are planned times and may be changed without notice. I will try to keep this up to date but sometimes in a rush to the Jeep ready I may forget to update.

This is not a test you are used to seeing here but I though I would share, because I am a geek as well. This was taken on Speedtest.net to gather he speed of my internet connection. Better than 81% of America!

And for good measure I tested it with two different testing services. This time was Speakeasy was my choice.

This seems to be a pretty good average. You have got to love speed, especially when it come to surfing the net!

I have been running the machine through its paces the last few days. Today I testing the positioning accuracy of it today. I wrote a program to have the machine rapid out 84 inches then rapid back to with in 1 inch of zero then feed into zero. I did this 20 times and the machine stopped at zero plus or minus .0003 every time.

Enjoy the video.

I had a co-worker wanted me to make him a custom exhaust for his racing mower. He brought me the pipe and a flange. I bent the tube to avoid the steering and the foot rest with it exiting the side of the mower Nascar style. Here is what I come up with:

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Since I recently got this machine actually moving I have been putting it through some tests. The other day I create a G-code program to move the table throughout its travel in various directions to make sure it worked as expected and returned to its previous position.

Since the table is driven by stepper motors instead of servos loosing steps is always a concern. This is generally contributed with pushing the machine to fast resulting is the stepper motors loosing there count. Not sure why, but is does happen.

After tuning the motors in Mach 3 to suitable settings I proceeded with the testing. I started with the table at around a travel speed of 600 in/min but was not happy with the sound the table was making. It sounded like it was struggling to make the moves this fast. So I slowed it down to 450 in/min. Still a respectable speed for a rapid move. This sounded a lot better and leaves some room for improvement.

This video shows the path I programmed in and the speed in which it travels.

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As the title states I am testing the movement before I start using he torch(saves money until I make sure it is working properly.

It is kind of boring to watch, but in a later test it made a perfect circle very close to the diameter I programmed it to do. Not to bed for the first trial after setting it up.

I just took some additional pictures of some of the aspects that are not really clear in other pictures.

this first one shows the z-axis lead screw and placement of the stepper motor.

This one show the gear box from a overhead shot.

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Since I only have the hardware for the z-axis at the moment I can only test this out for now. Here is a video of this testing until I get the timing belts for the other axis’.

the speed of the movement is slowed down for control and should rapid at a maximum of 135 in/min

The other axis will rapid a bit faster. I should have some more video later this week of the other axis’ moving.

I received a large shipment of part this week of parts for my project. I still have others on the way but I got quite a bit started this weekend. I started of day with opening up all of the boxes to make sure everything was intact. I then moved on to getting the rack onto the table. This took some creativity to make sure it was on straight so that the pinion stays engaged. There is also an issue with the rack not coming in long enough pieces for the length of my table. With the table being 9 1/2 feet long and the rack only coming in 6 foot pieces I needed to join the ends while maintaining the lead along the length. I came up with the idea to use the piece cut off of the end of another piece of rack to align the pieces together. Since they are the same lead it should work.

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Seems I was only allowing registered users to post comments on this site and no one could register:( . Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I hope I have made the correct changes.

Pertneer