Been big time lurking the last few months and today I’ve managed to set up the whole thing and get calibrated.
My question is: Is it necessary to take down the M4 every time you power it up? After calibration I assumed that you could leave it attached to the corners, release tension, slide your workpiece in and take the slack back up ready for cutting. However, so far I’ve needed to take it down, fully retract the belts, extend, reattached to the corners and apply tension each time but this seems needlessly laborious.
My question is: Is it necessary to take down the M4 every time you power it
up? After calibration I assumed that you could leave it attached to the
corners, release tension, slide your workpiece in and take the slack back up
ready for cutting. However, so far I’ve needed to take it down, fully retract
the belts, extend, reattached to the corners and apply tension each time but
this seems needlessly laborious.
right now you do need to take it down any time you power it off. When it’s
powered on, the system doesn’t know if the belts have moved since it was powered
off (so it doesn’t try to remember right now), so you have to do the retraction
so that the machine knows where 0 is on the belts.
I¢m guessing you say ¡right now¢ because there are updates being developed to
avoid this?
it’s on the to-do list, but right now there are higher priority issues (why do
network problems cause the system to misbehave, why do the encoders sometimes
freak out being much higher on the list)
Now, this is opensource, so if someone has the time to work on this, the patches
will be gratefully acccepted by Bar
I generally just leave mine on all the time, but making it save position is on the list of things to do. The tricky part isn’t making it save position, it’s making it so that when the machine powers back up it is clear to the user that it loaded a saved position for the belt lengths and if anything has changed that the machine won’t be accurate anymore.
Forcing a Retract All → Extend All is a hassle but at least then we’re confident that things are working the way we expect them to be
If you leave it on, we have successfully cut a sheet, released tension, moved the Maslow out of the way (detaching 2 belts), loaded another sheet, re-attached, applied tension and started cutting again.
We are running on the floor so dealing with gravity is easier unless you make a place to park your Maslow above the workspace so you can unload/reload. or hang it from a chain while you change out.
I plan on adding holes to the sled so I can just screw it to the mounting surface when I want to leave it on the frame long term so it keeps the weight off the belts. Hopefully this would make it so there is no change, unless I fell on a belt or something obvious.
It would be really cool if there was a button to save location and another (with lots of warnings around it) to load that saved location in the meantime for people who are willing to remove the potential concerns with a method like this while the software end is sorted out.
I would love to be able to contribute but my coding skills are not quite up to scratch! I’ll take on the role of user/tester for the moment. Thanks for your responses David!
Hi Bar! Many thanks for all your efforts and making CNC routing so much more accessible.
I hadn’t thought of leaving it on but I’m sure that if you’re doing it, it mustn’t create any adverse effects.
I’ll just get to setting up a hanging / resting station for the Maslow to sit on for the moment.
Side note: I was wondering where the name Maslow came from?