The Heads on Fire Community

- Setup:

Since we moved the computers around (blame MakerFaire!), we needed to change permissions on the machine connected to the Modela by going into

usr/bin/dev

and we did a

sudo chmod 777 ttyS0

We had sent several jobs to the Modela and to kill it, we did a

ps -a | grep cat

to search for the process (it's called cat!) and then kill it.

Another thing was to double-check if move was green in the

/usr/local/bin

So, again, do a chmod to change the permissions:

sudo chmod 777 move

and do a

ls -l move

to make sure move is in green.

- Sending the actual file:

First, you need to zero the bit. Controlling z is obvious with the up and down buttons on the machine, but x and y can be controlled in the commandline with move like:

move 1 1

After getting to the origin, lower the bit slowly, and that's how cad knows xyz's zero.

For milling a circuit board, you want to set the z min to -.005
We had a problem with setting z max to anything less than 1 (it just wouldn't contour), so we left that at 1.

Also, set x min and y min depending on the location of your board.

Make sure you have -1 for contour. We also used a 1/64 bit so set the tool diameter to 0.0156.

Leave xyz speed at 4.

We then sent the file after contouring it, but it stopped right before finishing the whole board.

Johann told us that cad does that! A way around that is to send the file through the commandline. So:

cat myFileName.rml > /dev/ttyS0

is what you want to type in terminal. And that should be fine (I'm testing this as I type).
update: yes that worked perfectly! Always send files to the modella this way.

(Sidenote: this also works for the epilog: lpr -Pepilog myFileName.epi
or: lpr -Plaser myFileName.epi
depending on what we named the epilog printer. Update: After testing, we found out we have the epilog printer named Plaser, so the 2nd option is what we will be using.)

Now to cut the board, first change the tool to a 1/32 bit.
Change the z min to -0.65 (which is the width of the board), and leave z max at 1.
Change the tool diameter to 0.0312.
Change the xyz speed to 0.5.
We left nz at 1 and the modella was just fine cutting the board out with one pass at that speed.
And again send it through the commandline with the cat command.

Thank you so much Johann for guiding us through this!

Some more troubleshooting to do! Some files do not always finish completely, and Xavier suggested that we look at the cad config file. This is located in the File system /usr/local/bin. That wasn't too much of an indicator though. Still working on that...
Update: Our problem was due to the tape not being applied flat, so the board was not perfectly horizontal. The machine was going through the whole file, but the board was not flat, and that caused it to not mill through all of the file.