Re-assembled with brand new 2Tankards Creations dust collection system using their amazing alignment and height adjustment jigs (HIGHLY HIGHLY recommended) and now I am cutting parts again two sheets of 96" x 48" standard 4mm thick coroplast at same time at 40inch per minute feedrate 12inch per minute plunge rate and .25" depth per pass cut rate // using .25" straight cut router bit from Makermade btw…I believe I can cut at even fast 50inches per minute feed rate and possibly even increase each pass cut depth from .25" to .50" so I can reduce overall machine cutting time (since coroplast is soft) but I am experimenting working up to that…obviously I don’t want to ruin this CNC machine I have spent months and thousands of dollars on because I am in a hurry. But I will update this forum as I find the fastest (reliable) coroplast cutting settings.
I did have terrible chain skip problems which caused sled to cut crooked, I determined that my X &Y motors and upper crossbeam were set back too far negative Z axis from the work surface and sled which made my chain line crooked from motors to sled…so I loosened up the upper crossbeam assembly and spaced forward positive Z axis towards work surface .25" which greatly improved chain line, now the CNC sled is cutting straight lines when sled approaches outside edges. The next Makermade M2 CNC Router I build will have a greatly improved easily adjustable upper crossbeam with X, Y, and X axis adjustability. I’m at the point now where I’m still always encountering various issues but the issues are getting smaller and smaller and I’m now able to quickly identify how to fix those issues much quicker than before.
This is an unbelievably complicated, extremely precision machine that requires extreme attention to detail to operate correctly (when building the frame and upper cross beam where the X & Y motors attach especially).
I would also like to publicly thank Mr. Casey Connolly at 2Tankards Creations who is a leading expert on the Makermade M2 CNC Router and Laser Engraver machines. He also sells world class 3D printed dust collection system (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!) and brilliantly designed and quality manufactured M2 sled alignment and router height adjustment jigs (also highly recommended). Do yourself a favor a watch every single video on his Youtube channel and watch them twice or three times and save yourself a lot of grief. This man is a true expert and true engineering genius with these Makermade M2 CNC machines.
I made a short thank you video for 2Tankards Creations, please take a minute and watch and then go subscribe to that man’s brilliant channel.
I’m definitely looking forward to building more of these Makermade M2 CNC machines using lessons I’ve learned. If anyone in Colorado USA needs help building and calibrating these machines, I can help.
I discovered pulling the power plug is not enough. Plugging power back in caused continued movement. What do is unplug power, disconnect the USB cable, the DUE board is still powered by the USB which is probably why it started to move.
The plug power back followed by the USB cable.
I don’t see this mentioned anywhere else and it should be.
Turned on my M2 machine and Makerverse and ALL calibration settings have disappeared. The windows computer I use is left OFF mostly and last time I had machine on my was November before holidays. Windows computer had wrong date/time so I had to set computer to auto update date+time first before I could log into Makerverse…
but now that I’m logged in, ALL calibration settings are gone…what happened? Please don’t tell me I have to recalibrate this machine…previously a motor cable came unattached, would that cause this?
in Calibration menu, the Z axis menu shows error messages I’ve never seen before
now the M2 control board isn’t turning on, I hear no sound…Makerverse was set to COM1 port at 38400baud…so I closed that port connection and re-established connection on COM4 port and control board turned on / I hear the whine sound…
It “appears” all my troubles today are related to the COM1 port…because when I switched to COM4 port on Makerverse (after logging off twice / restarting computer) now on COM4 port my M2 calibration settings appear again and machine is up and running
This COM port stuff has me greatly confused…I admit I’m not experienced and knowledgeable about this stuff but I openly wish Makerverse would just be revised to be more user friendly for people like us…
I hope my COM port situation above helps somebody
I’m now up and running cutting new parts I just designed for a new larger bicycle trailer camper shelter
A little background if you are curious: The com port is a way of the computer allowing communication to an older generation of hardware. We used to use 9 pin serial cables and a dedicated serial port. It was usually com 1, 2,3, or 4 and that number never changed. Serial ports have all but disappeared and now we have software serial ports a that are mapped over USB. Each new unique USB device gets assigned a communication port or com port number when it is plugged in and recognized by the operating system (if it is a USB-serial device and a mouse and keyboard are HID devices, so no ports for them or usb thumb drives that show up as mass storage devices). This process is called enumeration. A usb device sends its ID packet and the computer figures out what to do with it such as assigning a driver to it or a port number, so mouse, keyboard, arduino, webcam. All USB devices have to go through this process for the operating system to use them. Some systems operating systems assign the same port to the same device regardless of where it was connected on the USB. More recent computers assign port numbers to the same device depending on which USB port it is plugged into. I found that super frustrating when I was calibrating custom usb serial devices I was making and trying to keep track of them in the windows registry. If the com port keeps changing, that means there are muliple registry entries for them. Linux tends to renumber them based on the order of enumeration. ttyACM0 vs ttyACM1 is an indication of which one was recognized first and this can be dealt with in a few ways, but makes running 2 systems that are similar on linux a challenge.
The good news is that the calibration is stored on the control board attached to the motor wires and does not care what the port number is. Makerverse is set up so it uses a specific port initially, but the upgraded versions allow you to change the port number just because what you experienced isn’t totally unusual. If your computer can’t talk to it, Makerverse has no information to share and gives you the errors you saw. The hum is a great indication of connection or not. I personally hate the hum after about 2 seconds, but it is a good indication of functionality.
Thank you for your response and explanation!!! Yes, switching to COM4 port solves the problem.
I honestly didn’t understand what the COM ports were/are and I’m certain whatever issues and obstacles I experience will happen to other people so I absolutely APPRECIATE your detailed explanation!!! (and so will other people)
