Did all the wiring over the past couple days and got into the Linuxcnc setup configuration program this morning. Having a couple issues getting motors spinning but they are "thunking" so i know they are connected. Only spent about 10 minutes on the issue so im sure its just something simple like the limit switches be reversed or forgetting to turn the estop off.
Still considering how i want to accomplish getting heat to the wire. The 3 options in my mind are to use a power supply (server PS in pic below) with a dimmer switch, lipo charger with a hot wire function (allows control of voltage and amps, or purchasing an adjustable power supply ($25-50).
Also i wanted to post some more about the geometry of the table and how you can "trick" your software into cutting more sweep in a wing than you think you can.
As i discussed above in an earlier post, I originally wanted to make a wide table, maybe around 50" cutting area. But i had to adjust the width of the table to accommodate the sweep i wanted to cut. Have the tables closer together reduces the the distance of travel on the horizontal axis to achieve that cut.
In the pictures below, the black shape represents the wing i want to cut, the lines extending out represent the position the wire needs to get to to cut, red is the cutting table, and green is an imaginary shape.
In this picture you can see that with a 60" wide table you cannot get the cut you need, the towers cannot travel far enough
Because of that i was going to change my table width/wire length to 30". You can see that this allows the towers to get in position.
What if instead we could rotate the wing on the cutting area and line up the trailing edge with the hot wire, what would that do? This is the exact same wing but lining it up with the trailing edge. You can see that now it allows for a much wider bed.
In this tutorial i am trying to use all free software, so this problem may not be an issue in other payed software. In the free software you cannot "place" the wing down on the bed and position it like you can in a 3d printer slicer, like cura. It just assumes that the square block of foam is directly in "front", squared up to the front of the cutting area and centered. So what we need to do to accomplish this "rotation" of the foam is to trick the software by "hiding" the wing we want inside an imaginary shape we are going to have the software cut out for us. We will position our foam in that area in such a way to get the shape we want.
Keith will have a video out soon explaining this concept and i will post it below, but i had a few questions when i posted this on IG so figured i would document what i could now.
What we want to do is rotate the wing so that the trailing edge is parallel to the wire (bottom of the table is home). Than we need to measure a box around that shape (green box). What we want from that is vertical and horizontal dimensions. The vertical up and down length will be the wing ROOT Chord we enter in the software. The Horizontal length along the wire is our wingspan. The right dimension up to where the leading edge crosses it is our new tip Chord. Now you could either cut the foam to shape of our desired wing ahead of time or you could trace the shape of the wing on a block of foam and cut the faces manually after the gcode runs.
Its kind of a strange concept, hope i explained it ok. Like i said, i will post Keiths video once he has it out.
