The Generation 3 electronics have been fully assembled and tested and are now mounted to the McWire bot. Here is the full build! It took about an hour to cut, drill and hook up all the new electronics.

Gen3 Electronics and McWire Problems and Solutions

McWire ReplicatorG Machines.XML Entry

Mounting Posts

I used a 1/4" sheet of acrylic to make the base plate. The fans are mounted to a piece of aluminum L stock. For the hole pattern, I place the 4 boards on the acrylic and marked the drill locations with a sharpie.

Base to Board Spacing

To Mount the electronic to the base I drilled and tapped #4-1" screws with a couple washers and a nut to space the boards up from the base.

Attaching the Motherboard

To mount the motherboard I had to drill out the corner holes to 3/16" as I was a little sloppy drilling the stud mounts. This also gave a little room for adjusting the position and angle of the board.

All Boards in Place

Before bolting down the boards test fit them in place to make sure everything lines up. I also added some old VGA RAM heatsinks to the chips on the stepper controllers. It may or may not be needed, but they were getting pretty hot in my tests. Its usually better to error on the safe side with electronics, anyway.

Bolt Down the Boards

For easy removal I use one bolt on top, since there is a bolt between the board and the base plate.

Corner Bolt too Big

The bolt near the RS-485 connector was too large so I drilled/tapped a smaller bolt to fit in place.

 

Tapped Bolt

Here you can see the size difference between the #6 bolt and the #4 that I tapped with the larger threads.

 

Bolting Everything Down

After getting the motherboard in place and bolted down, I used the regular sized bolts on the rest of the boards (stepper controllers).

Attach Ribbon Cables

I tried to install the ribbon cables in a somewhat neat fashion, but its a near impossible task that requires much folding and pushing the edges of cables under boards.

Secure Wires

Everywhere else I just used zip ties to keep cables and wires in order.

Connect the Power

The final step!

Attach Steppers and Testing

Once I assembled everything I attached it to the McWire and tested out the controls with ReplicatorG. At first I had a few problems testing:

• Testing X motion moved both X and Y axis
  Solved with firmware reflash on motherboard
• Axis motion was not to scale
  Solved by updating the machine in ReplicatorG (changed steps per mm)
• X and Y axis movement jerky
  Solved by updating the machine in ReplicatorG (changed mm/min movement rate)
• Opto-endstops were not working
  Solved by changin the endstop mode in the motherboard firmware config to use 1.0 style

 

 

Here is another angle of the above photo.

McWire ReplicatorG Machine

Here is the machines.xml entry for the McWire bot I used:

McWireReplicatorG.xml