CNC controller – assembly & wiring
Monday, 12 September 2011
Assembly of the controller box has gone very well. The PC components (motherboard, hard drive and power supply) all mount to the monitor’s VESA holes through a flat aluminum bracket, and the monitor attaches right to the front panel. The keyboard gets sandwiched between a flat steel plate and the front panel, with some minor modifications to its silicone cover to make it fit.
The rest of the assembly revolves mainly around the PCBs and front panel controls. Before mounting the PCB assembly I installed the small USB daughter board that provides a USB port on the front panel.
The rest of the assembly mounts over this, aligning the tact switches to the button actuators. The remainder of effort went into managing the many wires neatly into the cabinet.
The lower cabinet assembly was much more straightforward:
Of course I wanted to fire it up as soon as possible, even though nothing was connected. The Arduino IC was not yet programmed so none of the UI elements were working, but I was able to transfer files through the USB port.
This is far from complete, but I’m ready to start integrating the Mach3 software with the electronics and make sure they can talk to each other.
