Progress
Progress report from yesterday: The RAMPS 1.4 Kit arrived in the mail, including an Arduino Mega and 5 A4899 stepper drivers. To get it working, I began by upgrading my Arduino IDE to 1.8.3. Then I downloaded the grbl-mega project and built it according to the instructions on the wiki. (I didn’t change any of the platform settings before building.) Finally, I was able to download it to the Arduino and it ran. So now I have a G-code interpreter, I guess.
Using the serial port, I was able to issue a “$$” command to list all the ‘$-parameters’ of the controller.
I did not try hooking up a stepper motor yet. I’m looking for a power supply for it. I had hoped to use my HALO jump starter as a 12V source but it doesn’t seem to put out any voltage on the 12V output when it has an open circuit. I did find a 12V 2A wall wart power supply in the basement. I might try hooking that up.
So next steps are:
- Set jumpers for micro-stepping.
- Set current limit potentiometer.
- Connect motor.
- Issue some G-Codes manually to start/stop motor.
After getting that far, there are further features to explore:
- Experiment with servo PWM outputs.
- Experiment with end stop inputs.
- Experiment with adjusting params in header file.
And, later, I’ll want to do a proof of concept of the whole laser cutter tool chain:
- Inkscape plugin to produce G-code.
- Tool to send G-code to GRBL.
- Confirm stepper, end stop, laser enable, laser pwm operations.