Will's Build

[Will Winder]

Last weekend I finally had all my pieces gathered together and spent some time putting together my ShapeOko kit. It took a total of 4 hours to do the mechanical assembly.

Electronics:

• Arduino UNO
• Buildlog Stepper Shield
• Allelectronics 24v 4.5A Power Supply
• Phidgets NEMA-17 Stepper Motors

Complete BOM (shipping included):

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Assembled Stepper Shield, I had a few extra parts.

Stepper Shield by WillWinder, on Flickr

Assembled controller.

Stepper Shield by WillWinder, on Flickr

Custom heatsink, my dad has a metal shaper and he milled out a piece of 1/4" aluminum so that there were 4 pads to touch each driver. I drilled holes in some dowels to act as spacers. The bolts are threaded into the stepper shield.

DIY Heatsink by WillWinder, on Flickr

Complete electronics assembly. I needed to sand the dowels so they would fit in there.

DIY Heatsink by WillWinder, on Flickr

Donor cable for extending the stepper motors.

Donor Wire by WillWinder, on Flickr

Spliced wires.

Stepper Motor Wire Extension by WillWinder, on Flickr

This is how I attached the phidgets motors (Note: yellow attaches to the blue phidgets wire).

All wired up by WillWinder, on Flickr

The AllElectronics power supply uses the same cable as PCI-Express cards, I found a couple of these in my parts bin.

Stepper Motor Power Supply by WillWinder, on Flickr

All of the electronics waiting for me to assemble the mechanical kit!

Complete Electronics! by WillWinder, on Flickr

The stepper shields were dialed way back in this video so that they didn't need a heatsink.


It finally arrived!

Inventables Mechanical Kit by WillWinder, on Flickr

First things first...

Steel Plates Before by WillWinder, on Flickr

I'm a sucker for black and silver.

Steel Plates After by WillWinder, on Flickr

Assembly at 64x speed.


Front view.

Assembled ShapeOko Front by WillWinder, on Flickr

Side view.

Assembled ShapeOko Side by WillWinder, on Flickr

And its first movements at normal speed.

[Burke LaShell]

Very nice. I really like your heatsink.

Now, it's time to run Hello World...
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Run_Your_First_Job#Drawing_in_the_air

...and post the results in the wiki
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Hello_World

[Tom Smith]

The time lapse with the feline helper are awesome! Nice work

[Will Winder]

I finally got around to configuring my shapeoko, the Z and Y axes were wired backward so I swapped a couple wires to get that fixed (I didn't want to bother with remembering a software configuration). The heatsink needed to come off to access the Z, so I took a couple pictures while it was open.

After starting the hello world gcode, the text was way too big. If you look closely at the hello world picture you can see the giant mirror image "Shap". I guess there is some sort of problem with my micro-stepping settings, I thought it was set to 8x micro-stepping (jumpers on MS1 & MS2).

My only other guess is that the 400 step/rev motors I bought from phidgets are actually 200 step/rev. That would also explain why the 0.9 degree on my motors was blacked out:

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Compared to the one on the phidgets web page:

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In any case, to fix it I changed the step/mm setting rather than adding a jumper to MS3.

Before:
$0=87.49
$1=87.49

After:
$0=43.745
$1=43.745

Here is my heatsink while I had it off, it took about 4 manual hours to make this with a very old AMMCO metal shaper (this isn't the one I used, but it is the same model). My dad and I found it amusing that once the CNC machine is running I will be able to automate making one of these rather than stand at the shaper for 4 hours carefully measuring each cut.

Stepper Shield Heatsink by WillWinder, on Flickr


And finally... Hello World!

ShapeOko #367 Hello World by WillWinder, on Flickr

Now I need to hook up the dremel and figure out the rest of the software stack.

[Tom Smith]

The black and aluminum looks tres-cool. Have fun with the hello world - seeing the shapeoko produce its first output is very satisfying

[Will Winder]

Last week I upgraded the X/Y motors to Nema23's, and today I got them mounted to the outside. I also have a dual Y installed minus the belt and electronics.

Each Y motor currently has a slightly different pulley configuration. One uses the standard 2 idler design, the other uses the alternative single islet design. I found that with Nema23 motors the single pulley design needed the idler moved out or down slightly, so I drilled a hole in the mounting plate for that.

I also cut out some aluminum pieces to hold the belt on the outside. They were cut on my scrollsaw, so far I haven't been successful milling aluminum with my ShapeOko.

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[Will Winder]

I'm also working on a torsion box to mount the ShapeOko on with extended Y axes.

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[Will Winder]

I got my long ShapeOko mounted onto the torsion box bed along with T-track hold downs several months ago. Ever since then I have been struggling with inadequate wiring... The wires were way too short and were all over the place.

The solution was to get a drag chain, as others here have done. I found a vendor on eBay and picked up a 1000mm length of it for $9 shipped from China. Combine that with some wires from AllElectronics, molex connectors from another eBay vendor, a screw terminal and this is what I came up with. It still isn't pretty, but it works a lot better than it looks.

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[Will Winder]

Over the past couple days I finally got around to starting another long overdue upgrade: limit switches. The switches I bought have an awkward shape and may cause issues for future machine tuning. I've been thinking about how to actually mount them for quite a while. I almost went with super glue until I found a bag of 4-40 screws that fit nicely into the switches and were just long enough. So I drilled 1/16" holes, tapped them, and screwed the switches in place.

X Axis


Y Axis (I may have to redo this one as one of the eccentric screws is pretty much blocked)


Z Axis


Z Axis trigger - I had to grind the pan head screw down a little so that it didn't interfere with the lead screw, it is still a little closer than I'd like it.

[Will Winder]

Over the past few days I made a box for my arduino and stepper shield to go in. After seeing Roo's cigar box enclosure I remembered that I also have a bunch of cigar boxes from cigarsinternational.com, they sell the empty boxes and it seemed like a good idea to get a bunch. One of the boxes was just the right size for 2 standard 12v computer fans, which I wired in series and attached to my 24v power supply. The box modifications were mostly done by hand and cleaned up with files.

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