Hi, I have just started out with a cheap CNC PCB mill. Reasons for wanting to mill rather than outsource are for another thread.
Just wondering if anyone has had any issues with these 'just stopped working'.
Most of the discussions that I have seen are about people that haven't yet bought a mill, or those that have bought a mill but not managed to get it working.
Mine worked at first then just stopped, just short of milling my first test board. This is my situation:
* Received mill from China, it uses an Annoy tools control board, which appears to be an alternate brand for Cronos maker. This has every appearance of being an Arduino embedded in to a 3 axis stepper motor controller board, with extra connections for laser, spindle motor, end stops and a couple of aux inputs of unknown utility. Very generic and clone of a clone as you would expect from Ali Express.
* Assembled half-a-zillion tiny brackets in to a CNC Mill.
* Plugged in and connected to Candle. Obtained manual control of machine, could jog it around using the arrow buttons. The required Ch430 driver was already present from previous Arduino clone projects.
* Exported board design from KiCad.
* Converted this to Gcode usign Flatcam.
* Imported to Candle. Gcode seems to load and display OK.
* Machine still responding to manual control. Zeroised coordinates at start point for milling job.
* Could not find any information at all about where to connect z-probe to control board. Using the z axis end stop input seemed sensible so put it there.
* Initiated a height map build.
The z axis unexpectedly went up instead of down, then stopped about half way up its travel distance.
And that's the last time I have managed to get any motion out of the machine.
The Candle software is able to open a Com port to the machine, and appears to send commands to it, but there is no physical or data response from the machine.
The stepper motors are all making a faint 'stalled motor' humming sound.
So....
Just wondering if this has happened to anyone else, or if anyone has heard of this?
My plan is to refresh the GRBL load on the board to make sure that I have the latest version.
Any other thoughts?
Todd.