My Maslow is working quite well now, except for the Z axis speed. I think I must have a router with a fine pitch on the adjuster as it takes about 3 or 4 seconds to drive each mm of depth. This really slows the cutting down whenever a Z change is needed, especially as I am cutting 36mm thick boards at the moment. With these boards I am getting scorching of the board and small cuts into the edge of the part as the router is sitting there for minutes as the Z axis drives in or out.
If I go into the firmware and increase the Z axis feedrate limit, what are the chances of it working? Does the Z axis have the same encoder sampling limitations as the X and Y axis that I have seen mentioned here?
There’s a test_electronics_firmware program in the Firmware repo that runs the motors at top speed for a short bit, in each direction. That could give you an idea about the top speed you could expect.
If you want to work with just the z axis in the program, IN3 & IN4 and ENB are the controls for that axis.
Question to you, what did you set in GroudControl as the distance per revolution for Z and question to the rest if it would be possible to set a multiple of that? ← Edit, no not a mutible, guess in English that would be called a fraction.
I’ve been thinking about how to handle this. The issue is that I chose a z-axis motor which is slow but powerful so it will be able to adjust pretty much any router. The trouble is that for a router with fine pitch adjustment it’s too slow and has way more torque than it needs. I will talk to our motor supplier and see if they would be willing to do a small run of motors with a different gear ratio so that we can get more speed. Thanks for letting me know this is something important to you.
For reference I’m using the Triton TRA001 in the UK, which is a nice router and fairly cheap. I’d definitely be interested in a motor with a different gear ratio. I’m not sure what multiple of speed would be good for my router though. Maybe 4 or 5 times the standard? Hmm, maybe that would be too fast, I’m not sure how I would pick a different rate. Maybe 2x or 3x would be a bit more conservative and still fast enough. Could we have a range of motors maybe, or a configurable gearbox?