Back in business!
Brent, will you be able to burn the person's name at the place in the dining room table with that machine?
Why I oughta!!!!
Bret,
what is the x and y travel on that thing ?
Lets call it about 7" square. So small.
But l like I said, I got it mainly to have something to learn about CNC and Gcode and to mainly make smallish circuit boards, and to see if I want to do some CNC milling type stuff in the future.
So here's my story and I'm sticking with it.
The first day I got it, I used it a bunch. And then the laser stopped turning off. It's actually kind of important that it can turn on and off, as otherwise, it just burns all the time.
I'm thinking i overheated the little surface mount Transistor that is used to turn the laser on/off. So I dig through my collection of stuff, and I find i've got some transistors around. And I've got a little SMD rework station. Basically a little super hot air gun that can melt solder. So I desolder the surface mount transistor, ans proceed to solder on another transistor, (not surface mount). Well, I probably got that wrong, and some how the arduino nano doesn't respond anymore when I plug it in via usb.
Darn dissapointing, So I connect the reset connector to ground, and can reupload grbl to the arduino nano. And i go through a bunch of stuff after that trying to figure out why the transistor isnt working. I manage to overheat the copper pad on one of the transistor connectors so that it came off the board. Fortunately, I found another location I could tie in, so i soldered in some jumper wires so I don't have to mess with the board and can experiment with transistors a little more.
So Then I take the nano off and dig through the grbl c code and find that there is a variable in the config.h that is now the default that thinks of course you should have a variable speed spindle. Well, My board does not support sending variable speed commands. With that variable enabled, the output pin for the spindle on my board is always at ~ 5 volts. I comment out that line, recompile, and upload, and now M3 will generate 5 volts on the pin, and m5 will drop it to 0. Bada bing, bada boom, I'm back in business.
So yeah, my transistor is sitting 4" off the board on jumpers, and its a bigger transistor then before, but it all works again!
TLDR:
Board overheats, laser wont shut off.
Replace Transistor, Arduino won't connect, Reload Grbl
Grbls Changed Defaults. Edit Config.h, connect new Transistor, All is good.