Difference between revisions of "X-Carve CNC Router"

Revision as of 04:24, 15 December 2021

Bloominglabs has an Inventables X-Carve 2015 750mm CNC router. This is a machine which can carve, cut, drill, and engrave sheets and pieces of wood, plastic, soft metals (like aluminum), and other materials.

Specifications

• cut area of 750mm x 750mm (29.5 inches square)
• Z-axis range of 65mm (2.5 inches of up-down movement)
• gshield with three 1.5A stepper drivers, PWM spindle control, and grbl firmware
• 300W 24V air-cooled spindle with ER11 collet
• 400W 24V power supply

Assembly and Maintenance Instructions

This is a pretty old model, so the relevant instructions seem to be a hybrid of 2015 and 750mm.

Software

Easel

Inventables's official software for the X-Carve is Easel, a cloud-based CAM program. An account is required. It starts with a 30-day free preview of "Easel Pro", which offers desirable features for a subscription price of $156 $233 per year, and falls back to the more limited free tier.

Alex tried to get Easel to work, but was unsuccessful. Getting Easel to work seems to require installing the drivers, changing the laptop's DNS, networking, and browser settings, and possibly also changing the router's and modem's firewall and port-forwarding settings. Everything in that very tall stack of software standing between the X-Carve's microcontroller, plugged in on a USB serial connection, up through the browser to "the cloud", has to work perfectly, and Easel doesn't seem to provide any error codes. Many people online use Easel, but no one else at Bloominglabs has tried and succeeded in getting it to work. With these problems in mind, it seems worthwhile to get alternative software working:

Alternatives

At present, the laptop has Universal G-Code Sender, Candle, PyCAM, FreeCAD, Inkscape, and dxf2gcode on it. Other F/LOSS programs have been tried (and notes added), but these currently seem most promising.

Proprietary

Alex has experience with V-Carve; it would definitely work for this machine. However, the current consensus has been to try to find a good F/LOSS solution, and only buy proprietary software if none can be found.

None of these programs work on Linux, so a Windows license would have to be purchased. Also, most have system requirements that far exceed the laptop currently assigned to the X-Carve; a new computer would have to be found or purchased.

• DeskProto
• MeshCAM
• CamBam
• Vectric's Cut2D or V-Carve
• Fusion 360
• G-SIMPLE
• Estlcam
• QCAD/CAM
• Alibre's Workshop

F/LOSS

Machine Control

• Universal G-Code Sender (works well, but is ugly)
• LinuxCNC (requires direct control of stepper motors)
• Chilipeppr (basic functionallity works, but the instance at chilipeppr.com 404'd when I tried to open the "ShuttleXpress" jog controls)
• CAMotics
• bCNC
• Candle (straighforward and pretty, but a massive CPU hog, especially when window is maximized)
• grbl-overseer
• Grbl4P (missing library org.apache.log4j, how do you install it in Processing?)
• OpenBuilds CONTROL

G-Code Generation

• PyCAM (Development has slowed but not completely stopped. Lots of features, but doesn't look overwhelming.)
• Aptos
• BlenderCAM (Even the oldest supported version of Blender (2.83) is unusably slow on the available laptop. This might be a good solution if a more powerful computer is assigned to the X-Carve, or for people that want to plan toolpaths on their own computers.)
• CAMmill
• HeeksCAD
• gcodetools (Inkscape extension) (abandoned since 2016, doesn't let you adjust the cutting depth)
• FreeCAD's Path Workbench (Seems viable for sophisticated parts, but complex. Laptop has FreeCAD 0.19.1)
• Solvespace's basic g-code export
• KrabzCAM
• Millcrum
• dxf2gcode
  • DXF files can be exported by Inkscape, Solvespace, LibreCAD, and most other vector drawing programs.
• dmap2gcode
• gcodeplot (appears to be intended only for pen plotters)
• OpenBuilds CAM

Both

• GRBLWeb

Future Plans and Upgrades

The following members have pledged a total of $300 (as of Sunday, 21 November 2021) in donations to improve the X-Carve and make it a good machine for people to use at Bloominglabs. Thank you all!

• Adam Stitcher
• jpt4
• dosman
• Kyle
• Christopher Tiwari

So far, $0 have been spent on the X-Carve.

How the remaining funds will be used needs to be decided. Below is a list of ideas on how to improve the X-Carve, many (but not all) of which require, or will be much easier by, spending money.

Reinforce Table

The (large, and generously donated by Jason Brown) table is very stable across its long dimension, but rocks along its short direction. This happens to be the same direction that the X-Carve's heaviest moving assembly (the gantry) moves. This will probably cause the table to visibly shake when the machine makes aggressive cuts.

Adding some diagonal braces under the table (especially to the center two legs) should fix this.

Fix Broken Endstops

The X-Carve has three microswitches that allow it to home itself in the near-top-left corner of the work area. Two of these microswitches (the X and Y axes) were broken when the machine was donated. (Their plastic bodies cracked open and their lever arms fell out.)

This seems like the right replacement part, and costs $2.86 each.

Fix Mis-Triggering Endstop

Sporadically, one of the endstops keeps mis-triggering, causing the machine to alarm and stop moving until it is reset. We haven't found a reliable way to make it do this (or not do it), but it seems to be the Z-axis endstop, and it usually occurs while the spindle is running. The two hypotheses are that it is caused by

• vibrations, or
• electromagnetic interference.

Josh Giem replaced the Z-axis endstop with a similar one salvaged from a board in the electronics room, but the issue persists.

Some people online suggest that they had similar issues and fixed them by putting capacitors across the wires. Alex tried this, and it might have made the problem less severe, but definitely didn't fix it. Making the capacitor too large made the machine unable to home.

Starting in 2016 (the year after our machine was made), X-Carves started being shipped with shielded endstop cables. Inventables sells an upgrade kit that just has the same switches with the new cables. We can't drop this kit into our X-Carve because it only works with the new (shorter?) drag chains (also available as another upgrade kit for $50), but we could probably get similar shielded cable from Stansifer's or digi-key and upgrade the machine ourselves.

More Tooling

The machine came with a few end mills. Bloominglabs also received, in a previous donation to the Electronics room, a collection of very small end mills and drills, suitable for milling and drilling custom circuit boards. Lastly, the spindle can accept 1/8" tooling meant for Dremels and the ShapeOko 2 CNC.

All that said, these are tools we don't have and might want, depending on what people want to do with the X-Carve:

• ball-end mills (for making contoured surfaces)
• V-nose end mills (for v-groove engraving)
• 1/4" shank tooling (much sturdier than the 1/8" tooling we have, for removing material fast or just resisting mis-use)
• downcut end mills (for milling thin or flexible material)
• compression end mills (for producing a nice finish on both sides of plywood)
• surfacing/facing mills (for making large, flat surfaces)

Also, tooling will wear out be broken, so we will want to have extras, and known-good places to buy more.

Compatible tooling can be purchased from many sites and stores, but Inventables is a good place to start.

Dust and Chip Collection

The previous owner 3D printed a mount for brushes and a vacuum cleaner. Completing this would allow the machine's waste to be captured and removed while it operates. It needs:

• a plastic disc (which could be made on the laser cutter) to cover the top of the vacuum adapter
• a shop vac (ideally with a cyclone separator) and hose
  • a nice home for these things to stay in
  • a convenient way to turn the shop vac on or off, either
    • locate the shop vac in a place where it's just easy to turn it on and off with its own switch
    • a power strip (like on the laser cutter) with a switch for each thing plugged in to it
    • electronics that detect when the spindle is running and turn the shop vac on, and leave it running for some seconds after the spindle stops
    • electronics on the controller board, and custom g-code, that allow the machine to control when the shop vac runs

Water-Cooled VFD Spindle

The machine came with a very basic air-cooled brushed DC spindle. While adequate to start with, it is noisy, not very powerful, and offers poor control over its speed. Ebay is fat with inexpensive water-cooled VFD spindles that support ER11 collets, and only cost a couple hundred dollars. If the machine is used often, one of these would be a great upgrade. They are available in 0.8kW and 1.5kW models; 0.8kW would probably be plenty.

Polycarbonate Enclosure

The machine needs a permanent enclosure to keep sawdust from the woodshop out, and chips, noise, and broken tools inside. The best material for this would be 1/16" or 1/8" thick polycarbonate on a square-tube aluminum frame. Ideally, the enclosure would be tall enough to accommodate the water-cooled spindle mounted on the post-update Z-axis. The enclosure should also be designed to be compatible with whatever the #Dust and Chip Collection solution is.

X-Carve Upgrade Kit Bundle

Inventables sells 2 upgrade kits for the X-Carve, and also a bundle that has both kits for a discounted price of $499.

Z-Axis Kit

The Z-axis upgrade kit costs $360 on its own. It:

• stiffens the Z-axis (which reduces chatter, making clean cuts easier),
• substantially increases the maximum Z-height (from 2.5" to 4.5"!),
• increases the stepper motor torque by 50% (to 212 ounce-inches), and
• adds better dust guards.

This kit does increase the height of the machine to 21.25", so affects the requirements for the enclosure.

9 mm Belt and Motor Kit

The 9mm belt and motor kit costs $190 on its own. It:

• replaces the 6mm wide 2GT belts with stronger 9mm wide 3GT belts, and
• replaces the X- and Y-axis stepper motors with ones that have 50% more torque (212 ounce-inches).

These replacements allow the X- and Y-axes to move with much greater force, enabling faster cutting speeds.

Unlike the Z-axis upgrade, this upgrade has very little impact on the overall dimensions of the machine. The replacement stepper motors are maybe 0.5" longer than the stock ones.

Z-Probe

A Z-probe makes it much easier to establish how much the tool sticks out of the spindle, which makes it much easier to consistently engrave 2D designs, or to precisely mill 3D parts. Inventables sells one for only $29, but it is designed for the X-Controller electronics, which is not what our X-Carve has, so it may require modification. (Our X-Carve has the older gShield electronics, with an Arduino Uno.) We could also make one ourselves, or buy one from somewhere else.