Had a great time assembling it so far. I had to undo and redo a few things because I did a few things backwards. Not sure if I wasn’t paying attention to the directions or they weren’t clear. Some items I caught pretty quickly other items I didn’t. A few screws were swapped leaving me wondering where the screws I needed were
I have most everything done, I just started the wiring, but will hold off because I ended up buying the router from Amazon and it’ll be here this weekend. I also didn’t have the waste board. I meant to pick it up before the packages came, but I didn’t so that will also be a weekend task.
Here’s hoping the rest will go together well and when the controller comes it’ll all work perfectly (hahaha!).
I have about 6 hours into the build so far. Everything is done except for the fact I didn’t have a wasteboard since the shipping came as a surprise and I hadn’t started to make it. By the time I had time my kiddos were asleep and power tools are not allowed to be used I need to make a table for it (I’m likely going to just make a raised platform on a recently perished table saw.
It would have taken a bit less time except I had a number of things that weren’t clear (IMO) in the instructions so some things weren’t done just right (things on the wrong side, etc), plus I used the wrong screws in one place and was scratching my head trying to find them a bit later. I think they do a great job labelling/packing them, but I’d like to see the instructions fixed up. I’ll try to put together some areas where I felt it was either lacking or I had to study the page carefully to make sure I had the left/right correctly made. Or maybe it is the fact that I was doing all my assembly late at night after a long day of work or working around my house without enough coffee.
Sadly the x-controller doesn’t ship until Wednesday, so the backorder tell me. I cannot wait to get it up and running. Hopefully it works just perfectly.
x-controller showed up, assembled it without too much trouble, sadly I think the holes for the front panel to screw it appears to be untapped, so I couldn’t attach that.
Couldn’t connect via easel, duh! I didn’t install the Easel Driver Installed it but the Easel setup still won’t connect.
One strange thing is it sounds like the Z axis is clicking away even though I’m not doing anything.
I tried two computers (one win 8.1 one windows 8), neither would connect to the x-controller via easel.
I tried connecting via the serial port and it prints a message (well 1-2 characters at a time if I press the outter two buttons on the x-controller): “NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!”
Apparently the FTDI driver was the issue. I installed the version from inventables, but I upgraded to version 2.12.24 from the FTDI website and it appears to now work. Time to calibrate when I have time.
Slowly finding time to use mine. I’ve had some minor issues, the wooden clamps seem to periodically come loose, usually after the carve is 80% done and destroys the piece; oops. Hopefully will get the real clamps soon. I designed up a carve for a dust boot, it worked pretty good, not perfect, but does well. I think my dust collector isn’t designed for the 1 1/4 hose it uses, so it’s strained trying to collect the dust through it; I mounting the hose at the front with the full 4" hose and that collects a bunch of the dust too.
My X axis wiring was a bit lose and would periodically skip; found this out when it basically just died. A bit of debug and I realized one of the wires was just a bit lose. tightened it up and back in business, until I accidentally carved through one of the wooden clamps. Oops. I started my 0 at the 0 of the piece of wood and forgot about the clamps and carved right though it.
I’m wondering what I need to do differently to try to cut through aluminium? What type of bits should I use? I have dewalt 611, will that work? I’m thinking of starting with just cutting some shapes out of AL flashing, then moving to something different. A friend mentors for First Robotics, and he’d be happy if I could carve out some parts for his team.
