Ramblings of a mad man
So in the middle of the week the Surf developed a strange squeeky knock. After a lot of faffing around and looking for the source (including thinking it was the top end – my hearing might be going!) here’s what it sounded like:
Further faffage, digging about and looking closely while listening to horrible noises found this:
Crank pulley (Harmonic Balancer) failure. Looks like I’ll need to grab one from either
Roughtrax or Milner.
I had a digital DTI project on the go, and was using a complex mix of hardware to convert its serial data output to sane values, then spit it back through a serial>USB converter. This was a pain in the bum and meant I had to run that and a laptop to datalog it. Seeing as I also wanted to datalog a couple of other channels (voltage and current) this was going to require a separate input and tying them all together in the laptop. Ugh.
So I bought an Arduino Mega 2560 and an LCD touchscreen for it which came with an SD card slot. I’ve spent a little time writing the code to display all channels, allow turning on and off various IO via the touchscreen, and datalogging to the SD card. It’s working fairly well but I’m struggling to get the current resolution fine enough to capture down to the 50mA I need to measure. I may try a simple sense resistor rather than a hall effect probe. I’ll update the page soon.
I’ve been tinkering with the G0704 based CNC machine’s spindle controller again, and now it’s able to step and direction control to give me fully automatic spindle speed control.
As you can see, it’s now at least able to home itself properly again. Soon the touch probe will be here and I’ll be able to start making chips again, but I’ve still got some motor guards to make up and the flood coolant pipework to sort out.