Post by C&C Woodsmith on Sept 9, 2017 23:24:48 GMT -5
I cobbled together something that I thought others might find useful, or at the very least entertaining. So in the spirit of the free exchange of ideas here's what I came up with to control the power for my dust collector and vacuum table.
It's basically a remote switch that is wired to a standard outlet that both machines are plugged into. The switch is zip tied to the top side rail of the AR8 (I did that so the switch can easily be scooted forward or backwards so there's no undue pressure on the switch). I then glued a scrap piece of wood to the underside of the gantry upright that would contact the switch when the gantry returns to Y0. Some simple editing of the post-processor moves the gantry to Y0 at the end of each run.
This worked awesome to turn the machines off, but what if you accidentally forget to flip the switch to turn them on? Not that I would ever do that. You could ruin an entire run of product. Like I said, I would NEVER do that. But better safe than sorry you know, so I glued two magnets, one to the switch and one to the wood scrap, that way when the gantry pulls away from the home position the magnets pull the switch to the on position.
The system works pretty great for production runs where I'm always starting from the home position. If I were zeroing somewhere else on the machine I would still need to manually flip the switch.
Here's a 5 second video to demonstrate how it works.
Enjoy!
Chris
It's basically a remote switch that is wired to a standard outlet that both machines are plugged into. The switch is zip tied to the top side rail of the AR8 (I did that so the switch can easily be scooted forward or backwards so there's no undue pressure on the switch). I then glued a scrap piece of wood to the underside of the gantry upright that would contact the switch when the gantry returns to Y0. Some simple editing of the post-processor moves the gantry to Y0 at the end of each run.
This worked awesome to turn the machines off, but what if you accidentally forget to flip the switch to turn them on? Not that I would ever do that. You could ruin an entire run of product. Like I said, I would NEVER do that. But better safe than sorry you know, so I glued two magnets, one to the switch and one to the wood scrap, that way when the gantry pulls away from the home position the magnets pull the switch to the on position.
The system works pretty great for production runs where I'm always starting from the home position. If I were zeroing somewhere else on the machine I would still need to manually flip the switch.
Here's a 5 second video to demonstrate how it works.
Enjoy!
Chris
