stevefrisby
SteveFrisby
Hello My name is Steve
I am from NZ originally where I was working in the electronics industry as a qualified Technician for around 20 years, I have always had an interest in electronics and designed and built many of my own projects over the years and have worked with many different types of equipment from ATM banking machines through to pokie machines. I moved to Australia ten years ago and got involved in the cabinet making industry and developed a passion for working with wood.
Unfortunately I was diagnosed with terminal cancer october 2018 and had to make a few major life decisions, I had to leave the Job I was doing. I decided to build a small wood work shop in a double garage thinking I might be able to do a few small jobs when I have the energy to make some pocket money and as part of that was the purchase of a Chinese made CNC. I contacted a company called Daymax CNC and after a lot of discussion imported a Daymax 1212 router with 3.2kw water cooled spindle, it used a rich auto a11 control system. I have had a lot of enjoyment learning how to use this machine but as I have grown in what i want to do with it have found some limitations with the controller. I use Vertec vcarve pro to do cad cam as I have limited time and wanted to get going without having to learn how to use say fusion 360. So the post processor for vcarve and the a11 only allows for very basic gcode, there is no spindle speed control for instance. I looked into mach3 and mach4 and purchased several controllers to do a later upgrade or so I thought.
Just before the Chinese New Year my A11 started to malfunction (Not powering on) which is a known fault with this system so I contacted my friend at Daymax and found out the Chinese government has essentially shut down all the factories and everyone is being told to stay at home due to the virus, so I decided to try the other control systems I had, I managed to get both running but they seemed to have a lot of issues, to me the mach systems seem to be to flexible with way to many options. Also the hardware integration seems to be hit and miss, both the systems I tried to get going had old drivers that would work with only certain versions of the mach software. I came across Masso by chance but it seems like an integrated system like the A11 (Software and Hardware) but with the features that I really want in my system. So I have purchased a Masso and am starting to do a major conversion to my machine. The good thing is when I got the a11 I wrote down all of the settings parameters for instance pulses per mm, which were exact when used with the mach systems so hopefully I will have not to many problems doing the conversion to Masso. I am also getting rid of the box that the original machine came with and installing the electronics in drawers under the CNC as I have limited space and it seemed where ever I put the control box it was in the way.
I will post a couple of photos of the machine and start a conversion thread in the appropriate part of the forum
I have one question, my machine used a setting of 69.569 pulses per mm at 1600 steps per revolution, I am going to change the stepper drivers to 3200 steps per revolution which should double the pulses per mm I will also bump the motor current up from 4.45A to 5.14A in order to gain a little accuracy. Masso setup seems to be different for X,Y,Z in that it doesn't use pulses per mm to set calibrated instead asking for steps per revolution and distance per step would i be right to assume if i divided 69.569 by 1600 i would have the two parameters it requires for setup (69.569/1600 = 0.0435) so steps per rev 1600 and travel per step 0.0435 or can i just enter pulses per mm somewhere?
Anyway I am very hopeful I will have an operational CNC again and a machine that has the features i want and reliability
I am from NZ originally where I was working in the electronics industry as a qualified Technician for around 20 years, I have always had an interest in electronics and designed and built many of my own projects over the years and have worked with many different types of equipment from ATM banking machines through to pokie machines. I moved to Australia ten years ago and got involved in the cabinet making industry and developed a passion for working with wood.
Unfortunately I was diagnosed with terminal cancer october 2018 and had to make a few major life decisions, I had to leave the Job I was doing. I decided to build a small wood work shop in a double garage thinking I might be able to do a few small jobs when I have the energy to make some pocket money and as part of that was the purchase of a Chinese made CNC. I contacted a company called Daymax CNC and after a lot of discussion imported a Daymax 1212 router with 3.2kw water cooled spindle, it used a rich auto a11 control system. I have had a lot of enjoyment learning how to use this machine but as I have grown in what i want to do with it have found some limitations with the controller. I use Vertec vcarve pro to do cad cam as I have limited time and wanted to get going without having to learn how to use say fusion 360. So the post processor for vcarve and the a11 only allows for very basic gcode, there is no spindle speed control for instance. I looked into mach3 and mach4 and purchased several controllers to do a later upgrade or so I thought.
Just before the Chinese New Year my A11 started to malfunction (Not powering on) which is a known fault with this system so I contacted my friend at Daymax and found out the Chinese government has essentially shut down all the factories and everyone is being told to stay at home due to the virus, so I decided to try the other control systems I had, I managed to get both running but they seemed to have a lot of issues, to me the mach systems seem to be to flexible with way to many options. Also the hardware integration seems to be hit and miss, both the systems I tried to get going had old drivers that would work with only certain versions of the mach software. I came across Masso by chance but it seems like an integrated system like the A11 (Software and Hardware) but with the features that I really want in my system. So I have purchased a Masso and am starting to do a major conversion to my machine. The good thing is when I got the a11 I wrote down all of the settings parameters for instance pulses per mm, which were exact when used with the mach systems so hopefully I will have not to many problems doing the conversion to Masso. I am also getting rid of the box that the original machine came with and installing the electronics in drawers under the CNC as I have limited space and it seemed where ever I put the control box it was in the way.
I will post a couple of photos of the machine and start a conversion thread in the appropriate part of the forum
I have one question, my machine used a setting of 69.569 pulses per mm at 1600 steps per revolution, I am going to change the stepper drivers to 3200 steps per revolution which should double the pulses per mm I will also bump the motor current up from 4.45A to 5.14A in order to gain a little accuracy. Masso setup seems to be different for X,Y,Z in that it doesn't use pulses per mm to set calibrated instead asking for steps per revolution and distance per step would i be right to assume if i divided 69.569 by 1600 i would have the two parameters it requires for setup (69.569/1600 = 0.0435) so steps per rev 1600 and travel per step 0.0435 or can i just enter pulses per mm somewhere?
Anyway I am very hopeful I will have an operational CNC again and a machine that has the features i want and reliability
