Part I: retrofit of an Emco Compact 5 CNC lathe

I recently got a somewhat beat up Emco Compact 5 CNC lathe. I spent a bit of time retrofitting it. (Note: "Emco" is Austrian lathe as opposed to "Enco," cheap Chinese) While the manual has a schematic, I didn't see much on taking it apart, which is a bit nerve wracking since Emco doesn't seem to make replacement parts. This is the first chunk of photos from what I did. No guarantees it will help, but perhaps you can at least see things to avoid.

So here's what we have to work with:


Pretty dirty, some rust spots.

The spindle moves if you manually program it, but there's no way to save programs other than a tape player(!) and no way to upload other than typing.

I bought a plug&play CNC setup from dmauch@seanet.com, which includes a set of Nema 23 500oz motors and a GeckoG540 controller. You can drive it using Mach3 or (hopefully EMC2).

In any case: first thing is to strip the lathe down.

Recent trip: beijing, Oct 2009

Some things right off the bat: it doesn't look like your dad's china anymore. If you just looked at the buildings, you'd think it was some new place in EU or a new version of new york. If you looked at the people, you might think HK. Definitely not what I expected for china. At least from what I saw, it's much less crowded than NY (where you constantly feel as if you are drowning in meat) or even downtown SF. And the air was clean, which seems impossible, but there you have it.

And the people had their pluses and minuses. I'm still not used to nicely dressed females clearing their throats like truck drivers and casually spitting on the floor inside a building. And the matter of fact way that Beijing people lie is startling. If you ask a question that they are too lazy to find the answer too will cost them money it seems fairly standard to lie right to your face. One example: a guide was trying to get us to go see some tourist thing, but we told him we were going to the forbidden city --- "Oh, you can't do that, they close at 3pm!" Which, of course, was complete bullshit. And thing was, it was trivially easy to falsify this claim since the gate was just 10 yards away. Stupid. Another favorite: if you ask a question they don't want to answer they just look away. Example again: taxi drivers parked by the side of the road "Are you working now?" which triggers no response and a studious look to the side.

Right off the plane, you can see a trend:

The airport is huge, with lots of space, and clean:

Grafitti in Beijing

Just a small bit of paint, but a very savage feeling in person.

Kick ass sculpture: Michael Christian

A lot of neat pieces at: http://www.michaelchristian.com

Like this one:

recent trip

I haven't been posting much about colts lately --- trying to learn electronics and build a couple computer controlled lathes.

But did have a chance to go on a trip. It was interesting. A lot of fire and the official ethos is: "don't f*cking complain and do something interesting."

Useful hardinge repair links.

This is a nice writeup on how to replace hardinge spindle bearings: http://aafradio.org/garajmahal/Hardinge_spindle_bearing_replacement.htm

Disassembly/fix/reassembly: http://www.csparks.com/hardinge/

Fixing malignantly stupid ubuntu linux and windows XP on a thinkpad

I've wasted two days trying to get any of my thinkpad laptops to drive some stepper motors. Both windows and linux have behaved like inbred meth heads when it comes to doing simple things they should handle.

Windows

I was having issues making the parallel port work. One suggestion was to change the "ACPI" option to "Standard PC" from it's current setting.

Easy enough. Seemed completely harmless since "Standard PC" seems less tricky than whatever was in there to begin with.

I did it.

Reboot.

Windows crashes.

Reboot

Crashes

Reboot in "Safe mode"

Crashes

Reboot in "last stable configuration"

Crashes.

Reboot in with recovery CD.

Can't recognize harddrive.

Mount the windows file system in linux. Copy a bunch of DLLs over to try to revert thing. Crashes.

Finally, the sysadmin here changed the "Serial ATA" setting in the BIOS to be "Compatability" rather than ATA.

Now the recovery CD could recognize the drive.

Reinstall. Freezes since I need a product key and the one on my laptop doesn't work.

Track down what it wants (what an insult given that it fucked up!)

Continue.

Things now work.

Linux

Linux is not necessarily any better.

Since windows blew up I installed the ubuntu linux distribution to try out EMC2 (a CNC program). The installation went fine.

Reboot.

Boot loader cannot recognize the harddriver! WTF! (Grub: error 18)

I spent around 4 hours trying to get something to work. Even trying to do a complete reinstall of windows using a rescue CD failed w/ errors that it couldn't find the harddrive.

Fixing ubuntu's complete stupidity turns out to not take many key strokes in the end:

1. You need to get into the "BIOS" to change a setting: reboot your laptop
2. Hold down one of the function keys (F1 works for me)
3. It will take you to a configuration screen
4. Select "security"
5. Set the "hide disk area" option to "disabled"
6. Reboot.
7. Should work.

neat machining videos

Start of ongoing list.

CNC porn:

• Hard core mass production CNC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwgobIVj4fU
• Another fun one by the same people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcGHtI9Lql4&NR=1
• And another for a mill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUQKGu7F5w&feature=channel
• Fast CNC cutting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYqN90gHOZM
• Now this is a production setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J4RlAmBuEo&feature=PlayList&p=199985F23F191210&index=1
• nakamura CNC lathe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Gtr4WbtNw

Machining tricks:

• Indicating workpiece in seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn7A9PqNftY
• Steady rest facing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThVprkb2w6g
• Using CNC mill as lathe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezx_hCSJDLQ&feature=PlayList&p=C228FBAE81E4F35A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=4

Building CNC links:

• Neat home brew CNC lathe w/ a crazy tool changer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1IDHIcyHLY&feature=related

• Cheap to build CNC dremel mill (from instructables). Not powerful or accurate, but seems like a good starter project before building something serious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6drMZqmyXQc
• Same guy: building cheap CNC driver board: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUyqscxLJ4k&feature=related

For those poor suckers living in CA: call Schwarzenegger *NOW*

AB962 is sitting on his desk. It will ban mail order ammunition, along with other problems. If he does not actively veto it by Oct 11 it becomes law.

What to do:

Step 1: call 916-445-2841 Step 2: Press 1 for English. Step 3: Press 2 for commenting on a bill on the Governor’s desk Step 4: Press 2 for AB962 Step 5: Press 2 for Oppose Step 6: Repeat as necessary (preferably once or twice a day).

http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/showthread.php?t=223525&highlight=prompt+ammo+ban+phone

This is a malignantly spiteful bill that is useless for reducing crime. It will likely increase death/accident/injury given that it makes ammunition more expensive: the majority (in my opinion) of gun owners are already undertrained, and this will make it worse.

Stepper links

Since the main point of all this electronic stuff is to build some custom CNC machines, time to start a collection of links:

• Nice H-bridge tutorial: http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/tutorial/h-bridge/bjt-circuit.html
  
• Some notes on doing motors on arduinos: http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/use.html
• Arduino on steppers: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/StepperBipolar
• Good stepper tutorials: http://www.societyofrobots.com/member_tutorials/node/168 and http://www.societyofrobots.com/member_tutorials/node/120
• Reverse engineering which stepper wires to use: http://wwwhomes.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/others/
• Even more stepper motors w/ lots of data:http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/an/1679.pdf
• Related: how to use an oscilloscope: http://www.doctronics.co.uk/scope.htm

Fixing arduino upload problem on linux

Symptom: the arduino IDE will upload your sketch no problem, but using avrdude raw only works the first time. Pulling the USB cable out and plugging back allows it to upload again (once).

Solution: (from http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1201441300): it seems to be a problem w/ the linux driver. Just insert "stty -F $(PORT) hupcl" right before the avrdude command (where PORT = the usb device such as "/dev/ttyUSB0"). E.g. in the Makefil:

stty -F $(PORT) hupcl
$(AVRDUDE) $(AVRDUDE_FLAGS) $(AVRDUDE_WRITE_FLASH)

You may also have to set your baud rate to 57600 (at least for the 328p).

It's such a relief to not have to use their IDE! Point+click to edit was driving me nuts.

Arduino. Or: How to hack electronics w/o knowing a damn thing

I've paused on the colt stuff to learn some electronics + micro-controllers (the little chips that get stuck in your car, fridge, cell phone, etc) so that I can build my own computer controlled machines. The "Arduino" boards are a great way to go about it. You can download code onto them from your computer across the USB port and then use this code to control electronic things you wire together and plug into the board. (E.g., by reading whether pins have power or not, and setting power out on other pins.)

The "hello world" program is to hook up a LED light + a resister to the chip and make it blink by turning a pin off and on. I've only ever used computers to toss around 0s and 1s, so it's neat to make them control atoms (sort of). Hopefully by the end of the weekend I can use it to drive some stepper motors that I can then attach to a lathe to make it computer controlled.

Here's a set of great class notes aimed at artists from "todbot" (http://todbot.com/blog/spookyarduino/)

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class1.pdf

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class2.pdf

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class3.pdf

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class4.pdf

If microcontrollers and electronics has always been mysterious, I'd really recommend checking the notes out --- the audience is non-technical artists, so it requires minimal knowledge. On the other hand, it's not pablum. He shows how to build cool stuff quick.

If you are going to go this route, just buy the $89 kit at: http://oomlout.com/ards.html Everything included to go from nothing to cool things. A bunch of different projects, many variations. I've spent all friday night tweaking on it!

Useful links:

• A bunch of neat arduino links: http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/
• Useful blog tutorial on how to use a voltmeter: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/multimeter/voltage.html
• And more generally an arduino tutorial at the same blog: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/index.html (Which turns out to be the person I bought my arduino chips from! She has a post on how to build a cell phone jammer: http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/)
• Soldering guide: http://www.epemag.wimborne.co.uk/solderfaq.htm
• The comments of this thread are very useful: http://todbot.com/blog/2006/12/06/arduino-serial-c-code-to-talk-to-arduino/
• Nice set of tutorials on arduino and many other related things: http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Tutorials/Tutorials
• And, of course, the "official" arduino forums: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
• Heat sink discussion: http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Tutorial/Power.html
• Awesome electronics lessons: http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/electron/elecindx.htm