Reply with QuoteOK got it thanks! Good idea!
Originally Posted by dharmic
For what it's worth, HSMAdvisor has a free online calculator and there's a free lite version of FSWizard which only has a few materials loaded. Fortunately, these include aluminium
Re: OmioCNC report
In addition to the other suggestions, if you have access to a multimeter, check the resistance between the shield on each connector on your USB cable. It should be less than 1 ohm. I had a similar problem on my mill every time I enabled power to the stepper motor drivers. Replacing the cable with another one where the resistance between the shields were less than 1 ohm fixed that problem.
Re: OmioCNC report
OK got it thanks! Good idea!
For what it's worth, HSMAdvisor has a free online calculator and there's a free lite version of FSWizard which only has a few materials loaded. Fortunately, these include aluminium
Re: OmioCNC report
FWIW, I made solid progress today, nicely cutting polycarbonate and aluminum. On the USB error issue. I added a ground wire from the router frame to power strip ground (thx dharmic). This didn't resolve my USB issues, but I believe it helped. I rearranged the computer and controller creating the greatest distance between the USB cable and the stepper/spindle motor wiring and this solved the USB communication issue. For today at least.
I'm on the the next tier of issues. I'm cutting at 12,000 rpm. When I raise the spindle above 12k rpm the machine vibrates significantly and becomes very noisy. Any comments or suggestions for operating at higher spindle rates and eliminating the vibration?
The aluminum cuts were in 1/8" thick 6061 al sheet. I tried contours and pockets and they both left a small ridge (~.01") of material protruding form both the top and bottom edge of the contour. Any advice on how to eliminate? I experimented with a finish pass of .02" which gave me a nice finish on the thickness of the cut, but left the ridge as noted.
Re: OmioCNC report
Your next step may be to look at shielded cable for the spindle. PITA but some guys have had good results, and it's not as big a PITA as switching to a U400-ETH, BOB, power supply for the BOB etc which is what I ended up doing for other reasons.
Does the machine shake over 12000rpm if there's nothing in the spindle? Take the tool out, the collet and the collet nut and spin it up. Mine's as steady as a rock. If yours isn't you may have a crappy spindle.
Re: OmioCNC report
Are you using a PC or a Laptop?
Re: OmioCNC report
Who? I'm on a laptop. Which is half the problem as it's a double insulated mains cable (no ground wire) and floating earth. At least on a PC it's clamped to ground - although doing that through the USB earth lead is pretty nasty.
Re: OmioCNC report
The USB communication issue arose again last night. I swapped to a new USB cable (swapped out the OMIO provided USB cable) which solved the issue for that session.
I am on a desktop with ground. I've considered shielding the spindle cable, but my issue usually arises prior to powering the spindle, so I haven't pursued this path. Strangely, I'm starting to correlate the issue with night time operation versus daytime. I only have two days/nights of data, so I will continue to monitor.
Regarding the spindle, I will test with spindle only, then add nut, add collet, etc. to determine if the spindle is good and what creates the vibration. From your post, it seems 22k rpm operation without vibration is achievable/expected.
Re: OmioCNC report
Sounds like a different issue, possibly, then, to mine.
Mine would run fine for hours then disconnect. At that point, simply starting the spindle would disconnect again and this continued until I left it alone for a day. It was only stuffing around with USB cable swaps etc that I noticed a great big fat blue spark when I plugged the USB cable into the computer. Grounding the frame fixed it (for me) but by that stage I probably had already swapped the cable. Make sure you switch the ferrite beads over from the original cable to the new one, too.
If yours is dropping out regardless of spindle and the frame is grounded then it'll be something else.
Yep, mine runs beautifully at 24k rpm. If yours doesn't run smooth with no nut, collet etc then I'd say it's a dodgy spindle - and you won't be the first to have to deal with this, unfortunately. Someone else got a bum deal with this too and I can't remember whether they replaced bearings etc or just replaced the spindle.
Another point - if it runs smooth with a tool installed too, and only gets crazy when engaging with the workpiece, it could be a case of feeds and speeds and simple tool chatter.
Re: OmioCNC report
No, the OP..Re: USB issues.
Laptops appear to be more problematic when using USB.
Re: OmioCNC report
Tested my spindle for vibration.
Spindle only, spindle with nut and Spinle with nut and collet all perform nicely up to 24k RPM.
I added a 4mm carbide endmill and introduced moderate vibration starting at 12k RPM. Some speeds were worse than others and vibration at speeds above 20k RPM dropped compared to vibration at speeds of 15-18k RPM. All of this vibration was less than yesterday, which corresponds to comparing a higher quality cabide endmill to the HSS endmill that came with the router.
I'm satisfied the machine operates sufficiently well and will experiment with various quality endmills.
I continue to play with the USB connection. It seems it has difficulty when initiating a session and can't recognize the controller. After unplugging/pluggin, reboot etc. it seems the PC recognizes the controller and then all is well. I might buy a PCI to USB 2.0 card and add new USB ports. This is a shot in the dark, since all other devices operate fine with the motherboard USB connections.
Re: OmioCNC report
What you have described sounds a bit like resonance. Could be interesting to test the spindle with a bit of plain ground stock, 4 or 6 mm OD, 75 mm long.
USB - many of us have sworn off the USB method of connection and gone to the ethernet. A benefit of the ethernet is that there is NO electrical continuity over the connections: they are transformer-isolated, and instead of 3 V signals on the USB the ethernet has 15 V signals.
Cheers
Roger
Re: OmioCNC report
There shouldn't be any vibration with the spindle running unloaded. Perhaps something is loose and natural harmonics are causing it? What exactly is vibrating, the entire thing? A video might be helpful if possible.
When I stripped my machine down for the first time I found quite a few loose bolts and holes with stripped threads.
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Re: OmioCNC report
Hi all,
I just got my Orange box X6 assembled and I've run into my first issue. The spindle just hums when I try to test spin itI opened the box and the connections seem good to me, but is there a good way to test?
Edit a few more details: The spindle controller is lit up and I see the numbers count up on it's display. This is the water cooled spindle and I do have water running through it. Also the spindle spins freely by hand.
Thanks
-Tom
Final edit: In case someone else has this issue. I was able to get it going!
After watching some youtube videos on spindles I notice the power connection was seated much deeper on their spindles. I disconnected mine and double checked alignment. Connected everything back up and it's running great now.
Last edited by Tom_S; 07-13-2018 at 03:06 PM.
Re: OmioCNC report
Now for a real question. Is the post processor by Jay on the BrainRight site for fusion 360, the correct one for the Orange Box?
BrainRight - Modular CNC Controller
Thanks,
-Tom
Re: OmioCNC report
Nice to see a simple fix for the spindle, Tom!
Dunno about the orange box. Any orange box owners want to comment pros and cons, it's something that gets asked about by prospective buyers and some feedback would be handy.
Another question. Sometimes I start everything up (start the machine, the laptop, Mach3, reset, ref all axes, a bit of jogging etc to find a workspace zero) and then start a job (usually start with a tool change and Z height zero). But when it gets to start the spindle, all I hear is a whine from the spindle with no movement and the message "PWM bumped to minimum" comes up.
Nothing short of quitting and restarting Mach3 seems to fix this. Anyone else experienced it? Am I inadvertently hitting some random shortcut key for "fvrk it all up"?
Re: OmioCNC report
I had all the time in the world prior to buying my machine as work was pretty quiet.
Seems like everyone is busy at the moment, no posts for a while.
I knew that when I got my machine that I would not be able to go near it for 6 weeks
because work all of a sudden picks up. Murphy's Law!
Hi everyone, my first post here! I just thought I would chip in with my limited experience, it may be of some use to others.
I have recently bought the X8-2200EPL, the one with the orange box. Reason for the choice of this one is I am using it commercially and will be leaving it to run in a dusty workshop so would rather not leave my nice new laptop attached. Also I noticed on the Omio website that this version would be better suited in the event of a power failure and will resume where it left off. Don't know if that is true but our workshop is in a very rural area prone to power outages and I wouldn't like to be in the middle of a carving on a nice piece of oak when all goes quiet......
Machine arrived promptly, around a week to the UK, no damage, all assembled easily. Ran one of the sample files and all seemed well. I'm totally new to cnc so had no software and decided to give Cambam a try. Ran a file that I will be producing for a customer and it all went well with the default post processor. The only glitch was the original sketch supplied by the customer was drawn using splines rather than polylines. It added on some extra arcs in random places but redrawn with polylines it was fine. I did try the Fanuc pp as suggested in the Omio literature but I had to edit out some extraneous gcode to get it to run.
I then decided to have a look at Vectric Vcarve, it looked ideal for our purposes, simple, straightforward and relatively inexpensive. I tried one of their sample files but ran into problems with the machine not being listed so no post processor. I emailed Vectric and they promptly replied suggesting to try the NC Studio or DSP pp as they use .nc files. In the meantime however I had stumbled upon a WWGOA video tutorial www.wwgoa.com/video/v-carving-artwork-letters-with-a-cnc-router-0011765/ where they were using a Laguna IQ HHC. The thing that interested me was that machine also read the file from a flash drive in a similar manner to the Omio. Purely based on that, however misguided that is, I tried specifying the HHC pp and it runs perfectly.........so far. I've not done any complicated stuff yet but I'm hopeful. The Laguna uses .mmg files rather than .nc but it doesn't appear to be a problem.
One other useful source I found was a post processor that Mark Hedley Jones has created for the EPL https://github.com/MarkHedleyJones/OmioCNC-Postprocessor but this is for Fusion 360 or HSM and Vcarve wouldn't recognise it.
Anyway, touch wood (some nice brown oak actually!) all seems well but watch this space.
(Incidentally, our workshop is quite remote from the office so we use a "Powerline" internet extender that uses the mains wiring. When I ran the cnc however, the internet died and came back when it finished. We've had a similar thing when running a laser cutter. Plugging it into a different ring main circuit remedies it.)
Chris.
Last edited by MambaDesigns; 08-05-2018 at 07:49 AM.
Re: OmioCNC report
Welcome aboard Chris - hope you get as many smiles out of the machine as most of the rest of us, and perhaps a few less tears too
Re: OmioCNC report
Thank you Dharmic!
One problem I've just run into. I'm looking at making a dust shoe but there is a lack of clearance between the spindle body and the bottom part of the z axis. There is only about 3mm safe distance which rules out most designs of shoe. The only thing I can think of is to make a steel strap to go around the spindle. The other thing then though is the skirt brush would be very close to the cutter at the back. The alternative would be just to mount a nozzle onto the front half of the spindle aimed at the cutter, maybe with a partial skirt to the front side.
Anyone any suggestions?
Re: OmioCNC report
Hi Nick and Mr Mamba, welcome on board.
Funnily enough I just dug this out of a box and remembered Nicks query about dust shoes before.
This is 3D printed, the design is free to use somewhere on the interweb, but you can see I had to cut the front flat to fit between the spindle and bottom Z plate.
It was crap so I barely used it, just the brushes getting a little stuck on a sidewalk was enough to make it move round the spindle a bit, and then it would fall off on Z travels. I also found it would clog quite easily and you couldn't really see what you're doing. So... if you can build a box around your router, much better solution. Then just rig up a small airline with a nozzle pointing at your cut area. Give it an irregular blast, or if fan powered just leave it on I suppose, and Hoover up at the end.
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