The Shop > Electronics & IC Programing

DIY bluetooth DRO for my mill

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PekkaNF:
Very nice to read your though process. You clearly have it squared out. You mentioned tractor head...that is big boy on this size of mill. Last week my brother bought a big hunk of aluminium....He wants to mary Jaguar engine and Ford gearbox. I showed him how to operate the mill and 6 hours later enough metal was removed.

The hunk of metal was way too big to mill on one setting. Because bottom side of the blank and mill table is flat enough it was possible to mill one part at the time....took four different mounting position to surface spacer one side once.

Most was cut with a metal circular saw mounted on arbor, then 50 mm four insert mill was used to surface. Pretty much max travel and max distance to column was used. Large vacuum cleaner bag and most of the floor was filled with swarf and even when table tops we covered with sheet, plenty of aluminium swarf was flung all over the garage.

vtsteam:
Haha, well that sounds familiar -- getting more out of a machine than it was ever intended for!  :hammer: If I remember correctly my tractor head was longer than the tee slot part of the table, and I super-glued square tube bearers on top of the table so I could fasten the head down to something.  :loco:

Well for another crazy head project, I could always remove the two screws that hold the DRO scale on, so again, the DRO is no detriment to max travel. No need for even an X measurement when surfacing a head, and the dials still work anyway. Z is the only thing you need for decking a head -- if even that.

Back to the present project -- today I wasted time deciding that 1.25" was too much length for the standoffs -- I realized that the supplied scale brackets added 0.4" additional that I didn't need. So I decided to mill the standoffs back to 1.000" and that looks a little better. Then I located the positions I needed to drill the standoffs to accept the supplied scale brackets, drilled and tapped those, and assembled the scale to the mill with 10-24 scvrews. All worked well.

Next task, attach the reader to the mill's stop bracket.  :dremel:

efrench:
The Shahe scales I have don't have very good accuracy (about .1mm) and one of them would randomly jump 5mm.  They now reside in a junk drawer and were replaced by glass scales.  That made a world of difference.

vtsteam:
Well I guess we'll find out what my setup does. The scales are the later stainless steel types, and the Igaging readers have been eliminated in exchange for the TI  MSP430 launchpad board and firmware. Also filter caps have been added in the reader heads. There are a lot of variables.

BTW if you have scrapped your old scales, don't want them, and postage is reasonable, i wouldn't mind seeing what i can do with them.

vtsteam:
This morning I measured the distance between the reader head and the fixed stop bracket on the mill. I then cut off another piece of the 1x1 aluminum bar that length and cut a channel in it to form a U bracket.

The reader head takes some very short, supplied 3mm screws, so I milled that wall .064" then drilled for the screws which needed a 20mm spacing. (heh, lots of mixed measurments). For the other face I added two side slots to pass a screwdriver, and the vertical slot to take the screw that will go into the mill's fixed stop bracket. I'll be fastening that with an 8-32 screw.

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