Mini Lathe PWM Controller Repair CJ0618

Posted by thingsimdoing

A few years ago I picked up a broken open box mini lathe from a local tool importer via Craigslist. It was advertised as an unbranded 7×12 digital mini lathe with only a picture and a brief description. I knew it would be the perfect addition for my home shop if I could get it working. It turned out to be a CJ0618B mini lathe, originally manufactured by Real Bull Machine. This lathe is relatively uncommon compared to the ubiquitous Seig C2, making it difficult to find information about it online. It seems to be extremely similar to the Seig C2, though with a lower build quality, fit, and finish.

While the slightly more common CJ0618A model comes with a version of the classic KB controller, the CJ0618B has a custom pulse width modulation (PWM) controller. This PWM controller appears to have closed loop spindle speed control, a feature rarely seen in these low-end mini lathes.

When functioning properly, pressing the start button on the lathe will power a display that indicates RPM, which can be adjusted with the keypad. The spindle motor would start after pressing the forward or reverse buttons. However, when you pressed the forward button on mine, the lathe would do nothing for a few seconds and then beep loudly and flash ‘A001″ on the display. Fortunately the lathe came with a small booklet that explains the operation and fault codes of this controller. This was rather lucky, as I could not find a pdf of this online despite using all my google-fu. I scanned a copy and put it up here:

https://www.docdroid.net/SDUalO1/special-instructions-for-cj0618b.pdf

According to the manual, “A001” is an underspeed error. This occurs when the controller is trying to start the motor, but is either seeing no spindle rotation, or a lower RPM than it was commanding. In my case it was the former.

I took the controller off the lathe to look at the internals and found two printed circuit boards (PCBs): one appeared to be for logic and the other for power. The logic board was labeled MCUPWM8T and had a microcontroller (MCU), a few through hole components, an unmarked IC, and the 4 digit 7 segment LED display. It had three harnesses attached to it, one from the tachometer sensor, one for the buttons, and one going to the other board. The other larger board handles the mains power and performs the DC conversion and switching, labeled KPWT-600B. There were no obvious smoked or failed parts on either board, so identifying and fixing the failure would take a lot more digging.

I took a look at the the overall layout of the power board to get sense of what was going on. Based on the components and their general location, I determined the following layout broken down by key functions:

ControllerLayout

Power Supply

Much of the board area is dedicated to converting 120 VAC into 5 VDC,12 VDC, and 107 VDC out. The 107 VDC line is created using a large bridge rectifier off mains power and a large filter capacitor. The relay coils are driven by a dedicated 12 VDC tap on the transformer and small rectifier. The 12 VDC of the logic ICs is created from a 18 VDC tap off the transformer. A 78L12 voltage regulator generates the 12 VDC line for the logic ICs. This regulator feeds a LM7805 regulator that powers the microcontroller. My guess for why they have both a 12 V tap on the transformer and a 12 V voltage regulator is so that they could use a smaller voltage regulator to feed only the logic ICs instead of the higher current relay coils.

Motor Control Relays

The power board has two relays: one switches the positive and negative leads going to the motor to control spindle direction and the other is a braking relay. When the braking relay is activated, it disconnects the motor from the controller and shorts a 10 W resistor across the motor leads. This load causes the motor to rapidly brake, slowing it much faster than if you were to just disconnect power and let it freewheel. This is especially useful if you have a large piece of metal in the chuck, as the chuck stops almost instantaneously.

Power Switching

This circuit is the heart of the motor controller. Pulse width modulation (PWM) is a way to control the speed of a motor by sending short pulses of a constant voltage, rather than raising or lowering the voltage. This allows the motor run at a slow speed while still providing sufficient torque. This is a pretty simplistic explanation, go here if you want a more in-depth answer. The MOSFET is driven with a gate driver, a TLP250 from Toshiba. This IC both isolates the microcontroller from the high voltage MOSFET and switches the MOSFET with a higher voltage and current than the microcontroller could. There’s also a large diode mounted to the same heatsink as the MOSFET. This appears to be a fly back diode to protect the circuit from back EMF generated when the motor is powered off.

Overcurrent Protection

This board uses a LM358P dual op amp to implement the overcurrent protection functionality. One side is used as an amplifier to amplify the voltage measurement taken from a current sense resistor on the controller output. This voltage is very small (<0.5V), which is why the amplifier is necessary. This voltage is proportional to the current draw of the motor; the higher the current draw, the higher the voltage. The other side is used as a comparator to compare the amplified current sense voltage to a reference voltage. There’s a small set of DIP switches that allow you to set the max motor current before the overcurrent protection kicks in. The output from the comparator will either turn on the green “normal” LED and send Vcc to the gate driver IC, or will turn on the red “OP” LED and cut off Vcc to the gate drive IC.

Power Board Control

Fortunately the connector pinout between the logic and power board was labeled so I could pretty easily see how the logic board controls the power board.

The power board supplies 5 VDC and ground to the logic board. The logic board returns a PWM signal and two relay control lines. The logic board also reads the input from the optical sensor mounted to the spindle and converts it to RPM. Since the spindle was not rotating, possible failure modes include

Logic board not outputting the PWM signal
Power board not switching MOSFET based on the PWM signal
MOSFET is switching, but isn’t receiving voltage from power supply
MOSFET is switching, but voltage is not making it to motor

Measuring a PWM signal is pretty easy if you have an oscilloscope. I didn’t have one, so I connected the output to an Arduino and wrote a simple sketch to confirm that is was outputting a PWM signal. I later realized that my multimeter, a Fluke 177, has the ability to measure a simple frequency signal like this.

I inspected the RPM sensor mounted to the spindle and found a broken trace on the PCB, which I fixed with some 30 AWG wire. The tachometer sensor is an optical slot switch and was marked as WYC H12A5. I measured the output and found it to be very weak, outputting <1 V when unblocked. I replaced the switch with a Sharp GP1S53VJ000F optical switch.

While these sensor problems might have been problematic later on, they weren’t the cause of my issue, as the motor wasn’t even attempting to rotate. It seems like the microcontroller will wait for 4 to 5 seconds before throwing the error code. If your lathe turns on, but doesn’t indicate an RPM on the display, and shuts off after a few seconds I would check the output of this sensor at the logic board.

Since the PWM signal was being generated correctly, I decided to check for proper voltages around the board. I found the data sheets for the IC’s and located the Vcc pins for each. I measured around 8 VDC at the gate driver, but the data sheet specified a minimum of 10 VDC. I traced it back to a bad 12VDC regulator and shot off an order to Digikey. A few days later I replaced the failed regulator and powered the controller on.

The input at the logic ICs was now a steady 12 V! My joy was short lived as the controller still gave me the A001 error. However now the red overcurrent protection (OP) LED was on. What was odd was that the LED turned on the moment the controller was powered on. This behavior made me suspect there was something wrong with the circuitry that activates the OP LED, because the light was turning on with no current having gone through the motor.

I traced more of the circuit and found that the op amp output controls power to the LEDs as well as switching power to the gate driver IC. This ensures that the motor stops when the overcurrent protection is activated. I used a digital multimeter to measure the pins of the op amp and found the voltage comparator section of it was not working correctly. The non-inverting input was larger than the inverting input, so the output should have been high, but was reading low. This was causing the overcurrent protection to be activated. Another order to Digikey and I had a new TI LM358P op amp.

When the controller turned on I was greeted with a green LED and no red OP LED! I tried once more to fire up the motor, but alas A001 was staring back at me again.

At this point I started diving deeper into the board to create a schematic of the entire circuit. Despite only being a single layer PCB, this proved difficult because the components are packed very tightly and there are many traces that weren’t visible unless the components were desoldered. A few days of on and off troubleshooting and I began to suspect the gate driver. All the other components between the output of the gate driver and the MOSFET gate seemed fine, but there was never any voltage on the gate pin when the controller was attempting to start up the motor.

The original IC, Toshiba TLP250, has since been discontinued. You can still get them on eBay from China, but I didn’t really want to wait that long. After a little bit of research I found Toshiba had a new gate driver IC, TLP351, that is pin compatible. Another Digikey order later and I had a replacement IC. At this point I wasn’t expecting much given the history of debugging this PCBA, but when I turned on the controller, the motor sprang to life! It was quite a thrill after several weeks of working on this.

I began to play with the motor and speed settings and noticed a weird issue. I wasn’t able to get the rotation direction to reverse. On a lathe sometimes you want the spindle to turn one way or the other, depending on which side of the part your cutting tools is. On this controller if you press reverse while the motor is spinning, it is supposed to ramp down in speed, stop, and the ramp back up in the opposite direction. On mine it would ramp down, stop, and then ramp up in the same direction.

I also noticed the direction control relay would close when the controller was turned on, but would never open when it should have. The same was true of the brake relay, the motor coasted to a stop, instead of being shorted to the braking resistor.

I started to dig back into the power and logic board to see how the relays were controlled. I checked for 12 VDC on one side of the coil and found it on both relays. Tracing back the path to ground it seems the relays are grounded at the logic board. Taking a closer look at the logic board, I found a 8 pin DIP IC with its part number marking intentionally removed, which made investigating this IC challenging. This device was the interface between the microcontroller output pins and the relay coils path to ground. I traced back all the pins and came up with the below schematic:

MysteryIC

Using the schematic, it’s evident that this is an IC that controls two 12 VDC relay coils by switching them to ground, runs on 5 VDC, and takes a logic level input from a microcontroller. I also noticed that the input from the microcontroller went to two pins each. I thought this might be some kind of Darlington array transistor, but the pinout didn’t match anything that I could find. Searching around online I stumbled across a list of logic ICs and sorted them by pin count until one caught my eye: a dual 2-input NAND 30 V / 250 mA relay driver. Based on the data sheet, the pinout didn’t match exactly, but it was close.

MM74C908N

A little more searching and I found it’s not uncommon to use logic gates (AND, NAND, OR gates) to allow a microcontroller to switch a high current load, like a relay or light. Eventually I came across a NAND gate that matched the pin out: TI SN75451BP Dual Peripheral Driver.

One last order to Digikey and I had a fully functional lathe controller!

Total parts replaced:

78L12 12VDC voltage regulator
TI LM358P dual op amp
Toshiba TLP250 gate driver
TI SN75451BP NAND Gate
Optical slot switch

Given all of these failed components are ICs, I would guess that some kind of voltage spike or power surge occurred and blew all these components simultaneously.

This repair tested the limits of my board troubleshooting and repair abilities. It was frustrating at times to find and fix issues only to reveal more issues, but I am glad I stuck with it as I now have a fully functionally lathe.

Here are some more photos of the PCBs, some with the components removed so you can see the traces better.

Building a CNC Mill Stepper Driver

Posted by thingsimdoing

When I bought my Sherline mill, it came with stepper motors, but no driver box. The drive box takes the output from a PC parallel port (small electrical signals indicating which axis should move and in what direction).

Drive boxes contain several essential parts:

Power supply
Stepper motor drivers
Break out board
Connectors
Fuses and wiring

I’m kind of particular about the control electronics of a piece of equipment. Control electronics should be layout in such a way that they are easily serviced. Nothing worst than trying to trace down a problem in a rats next of wiring. Below is as list of some practices I like to use when laying out an electronics enclosure.

Components should be spaced to allow airflow around them
Components should be removable without taking out an inordinate amount of other components
Mount components to a removable panel, rather than directly to the enclosure
Wiring should be neatly bundled, using removable wiring loom where possible
Removable connectors are preferred over soldered connections
Wire ferrules should be used when making connections to terminal blocks.
Wiring going to a removable external panel should have extra length to allow the panel to be removed without straining connections (called a service loop)

Finding the right enclosure was probably the hardest part of this project, mostly because I had many criteria.

Mostly made of metal
Top should be removable without taking front or rear panel off
Removable front and rear panels
At least 10″x10″ and ideally ~4″ tall (based on some rough dimensions of the power supply and driver)
Less than $50

I found several enclosures that fit a few of the requirements, such as:

Par-metal table top series. Nice, but too much money.

Circuit Specialists EM Series Price is right, but a little too tall.

The one I settled on was from eBay, but I also found it on amazon

This enclosure fit all my criteria. My only gripe with it would be that the front and back panel are plastic and snap in place instead of using screws.

As I mentioned above, mounting components such as drivers and power supplies to a removable panel inside the enclosure makes assembly and service much easier. Parts can be installed and wired on the bench and the panel can be placed into the enclosure in one shot. This is a pretty common practice in industrial control panels. In fact, most enclosure suppliers (like Hoffman) sell panel kits that fit into their enclosures.

I took measurements of the inside of my enclosure and cut a panel out of 0.090″ aluminum sheet. 1/4″ nylon spacers and 8-32 hardware secure the panel to the enclosure. To find the position of mounting holes, I printed out a 1:1 scale outline of the power supply and laid it down next to the driver adjusting their relative locations until I was happy with the clearance.

When it came to the rear panel layout I did use CAD software, as I wanted the connectors to spaced evenly and I needed to make sure I had room to run the wiring. Again, I printed a 1:1 scale drawing with the cutouts and screw holes marked, and traced that onto the rear panel.

A step drill made quick work of the holes for the circular DIN connectors and AC input fuse.

The remainder of the cutouts were made on the mill.

A sharp utility knife squared off the corners of this cutout for the power switch on the front panel.

Skipping forward a few steps, the AC input connector and fuse has been installed and wired to the front power switch and power supply.

I used 4 wire 22 gauge shielded security system cable from McMaster to make the internal connections from the driver board to the DIN connectors. Where the wires connect to the Phoenix connectors (also called Euroblocks, those green pluggable screw terminal connectors) I terminated the wires with wire ferrules and heat shrink over the cable covering.

Using wire ferrules instead of bare stranded wire in a screw terminal is good practice, as the strands of wire tend to get broken in screw terminals, increasing the contact resistance.

If you’d like to learn more than you ever probably wanted to about wire ferrules and their use, see this white paper from Weidmuller.

A cable tie mount on the power supply neatly bundles the stepper motor cables.

One last overall shot

At this point I thought I was done. However, my decision to use the 4 axis all-in-one board was bugging me. It’s known to be buggy, and if one axis blew the board could be taken out entirely. In the name of making a more robust driver, I switched to individual axis drivers and a break out board.

The breakout board was pretty easy to mount. 4-40 self tapping screws and nylon spacers secured the board to the enclosure panel. The individual drivers where more challenging. There wasn’t enough room to lay them flat, which meant they need to be mounted on the edge of their heat sink. I thought about a few ways to mount them (screws coming up from the bottom, adhesive, pieces of all thread) before I came up with the idea of using a small strap through the heat sink fin.

Using the same 0.090″ aluminum, I machined some 3/8″x4″ straps, with 1/8″ holes for 4-40 hardware.

Laying out a hole pattern to space the drivers on a 2″ pitch.

First test fit.

Success! The driver is firmly attached, and most importantly, I can remove the driver easily if I need to change setting on the DIP switches. An added bonus is that the heat sink can conduct some of its heat away to the aluminum panel beneath it.

Fortunately the wiring I had made previously for the stepper outputs fit fine, so those did not have to be remade.

Some labels on the back finish the driver box off.

Over Center, Under Pressure

Posted by thingsimdoing

One of the ways the mold-a-rama process differs from traditional injection molding is the way the part is ejected from the mold. Usually one of the dies has a set of ejector pins that pop the part out of the mold (if you look at most plastic products you will see a series of small circular or square indentations on the back side, these are small marks left from when the ejector pin pressed the part out of the mold.) In this lego manufacturing video you can see the thin ejector pins stick out right as the part falls out of the mold at the 40sec mark.

To keep the machine simple, the mold-a-rama uses no ejector pins. Instead it relies on the part staying in place while the molds open around it. This is possible because the bottom of mold-a-rama die is actually open. This is a picture of the bottom of my mold dies.

The base of the plastic part sticks to the tank lid (which is why all mold-a-rama toys have some kind of flat base.) Traditional injection molding dies form a sealed cavity when they meet, save for the sprue, the opening where plastic enters the mold. Mold-a-rama dies form a complete cavity by sealing against the melt tank lid (the aluminum square below the molds, which also serves as a cover for the plastic melting tank). As you can imagine, it is very important that the dies press firmly against the melt tank lid, otherwise plastic would leak out between the dies and the tank lid.

Below is a CAD screenshot of the mold cylinder assembly I originally made, the die is the blue rectangle. Can you guess if they functioned correctly?

The answer is no, no they did not. When the dies closed against each other they popped up slightly, instead of being forced downward to seal against the melt tank. The can been seen in the video below. Watch towards the end and you will see the pair of molds raise up slightly.

If I were to run this in an injection cycle I would have melted plastic spewing out. After some head scratching I realized I had the mold cylinders (the grey rectangular part in the CAD screen shot) placed above the pivot point (the grey circular part), this meant that when the molds pressed against each other it tended to rotate the entire mold cylinder and mold counter clockwise about the pivot point, which meant the mold moved in the upwards direction. I tested this theory by flipping the entire mold cylinder and mount upside down. Now the mold cylinder was below the pivot point, which meant the mold cylinder now tended to rotate clockwise about the pivot point, forcing the die downward. This video shows how the molds are forced downward when they meet.

Armed with this realization, I redesigned the mold cylinder mounts to match the flipped version I had tested. With the two designs side by side (old on left, new on right) you can see how the mold cylinder location has changed relative to the pivot point.

I also used this as an opportunity to to redesign the way the dies are constructed and how they interface with the mold cylinder, but that is for another post! Below are some pictures I took while machining the parts for the cylinder mounts.

The above part was the first part I CNC cut on my mill and boy was it a learning experience. I probably scrapped 3 or 4 parts before I made the first one correctly. Between fixturing, weird g-code bugs, and getting feeds and speeds right I learned so much on that first part.

The final product. The slotted screw holes allow me to fine tune the position of the die at the extended position. The bolts holding the bracket to the cylinder have serrations under the heads which bite into the aluminum. This prevents the cylinder from slipping relative to the bracket when the dies meet. The other large cutouts are clearance holes for the cylinders air fittings.

The Apartment Workshop Series: Mini Mill

Posted by thingsimdoing

I’ve been thinking about getting my own mill for several years. I just like the idea of being able to shape metal. For the type of odd ball projects I like, I end up making a lot of my own parts, or customizing off the self ones. Having a mill allows me to do that easier and with much greater precision. I briefly looked at 3D printers, but parts produced on them have such low mechanical strength they really aren’t suited to my projects. Plus I like the idea supporting subtractive manufacturing (milling), as all anyone ever talks about is additive manufacturing (3d printing) these days.

Picking a mill can be a daunting task. There are so many factors to consider: price, working envelope, CNC or manual, construction, spindle type, etc. Being that I planned on operating this inside my living room, my options quickly narrowed. After much research I found several machines that fit the bill:

Little Machine Shop 3900 Solid Column mini mill

Taig Micro Mill

Sherline 2000/5400

The taig and sherline are a closer match, as the LMS mill is more of a mini mill, while the others are more micro mills. The LMS mill was my favorite due to the much heavier construction, more powerful motor, and standard r8 spindle. However it is just slightly too large, on it’s own it is not that big, but when you factor in that it will need an enclosure (which is kind of a must have if you plane on running a mill inside your house) it just get’s too big.

Between the taig and sherline, I prefer the taig. It’s heavier steel construction make it much stiffer than the all aluminum sherline. Neither one will handle steel all that well, both can easily do plastic, but for aluminum the extra rigidity of the taig helps reduce chatter.

I was all set to buy a taig, but I came across a deal I could not pass up on craigslist. I got a sherline 2000 CNC ready mill, with steppers for less than 1/3rd the retail price. Whoever was using it last was cutting wood, as there are wood particles all over. It will need to be disassembled cleaned and lubed before use.

It fits very nicely on my workbench, and even when an enclosure is added it should not hog too much of the work surface. It did not have a control box, so I’ll need to start looking at stepper drivers, power supplies, and machine control software. Looking forward to this!

Sealing it

Posted by thingsimdoing

With the melt tank installed and the pump body assembled, I can now start fitting the injection cylinder to the tank. The large (50mm!) air cylinder moves a piston in the pump body to draw in molten plastic, and then force it into the mold cavity. The piston seals to the pump body with a cup seal. The original mold-a-rama actually has no seal on the piston itself, it seals around the shaft of the injection cylinder, the seal can be seen here:

This is the injection ram of the mold-a-rama. The seal is in the center of the picture on the aluminum plate, the fiberglass insulation is covering the tank.

Installing the seal was a real bear. The cup seal is sized for a 3″ cylinder, it flares out to ~3.25″ OD to press against the cylinder walls. I needed to compress is to fit it into the cylinder. Softening the seal really had no impact on it’s flexibility, what I really needed was a piston ring compressor. Lacking that I used several daisy chained cable ties. That still didn’t work well so I used some plastic tools to push the seal in.

I wasn’t sure what to use to insulate the melt tank until a fateful trip to Lowes. In the pipe insulation section I found this self-adhesive aluminum foil backed foam tape. The adhesive holds up to the tank temperatures, and the heat radiating off the tank is noticeable reduced (as measured using the calibrated portion of the back of my hand).

I looked long and hard for a plastic water tank that was compact, but had a large enough opening to fit the water pump through. The water pump is supposed to be submerged in the water tank, this will extend the pump life by keeping it cooler. I gave up on finding a plastic tank and made a metal one myself. The body is made from 6″x6″x.120″ wall aluminum tubing with a water jet aluminum flange and lid. A cable gland seals around the power cable. The gold cylinders sticking out from the flange are rivnuts, those along with thumb screws will allow tool-less removal of the water tank lid for refills. I plan to add a sight glass later on so I can check the water level with out removing the lid.

The mount for the mold delivery cylinder (the one that pushes the finished plastic part into the retrieval bin) is made from a small piece of 1″x3″ aluminum tubing welded to the top frame and a shaft collar.

The lower half of the aluminum shaft collar is welded to the back of the rectangular tubing, the upper half is free and is what clamps onto the cylinder.

The molder is pretty awkward to move around as it doesn’t sit on a wheeled base. I added handles to each side to make moving it a little easier. The first set of handles I got from McMaster were plastic, thinking the machine couldn’t weight more than 100-150lbs, it turns out I forgot to take into account two very heavy items: the water chiller and the compressor. After putting those in, the machine weights closer to 200lbs. The plastic handles were quickly swapped out for some beefy aluminum ones. I’ll still probably move the machine with the compressor and chiller removed, but now I have a lot move confidence in the handles while moving the machine.

And finally, before I go, a sneak peak of the new molds!

Build Blitz Weekend 1

Posted by thingsimdoing

With the deadline for complete rapidly approaching, progress has stepped up. I spent most of my Saturday machining, welding, and cutting.

The bottom of the main valve on top of the injection cylinder has pipe threads to accept a compression fitting. One note about pipe tap, you need to be really careful about your tap depth. If you tap too deep with a tapered pipe tap you can end up in a situation where your fitting bottoms out before the threads tighten up, leaving you with a leaky pipe connection. So pay attention to that thread call out and test with a fitting if you are unsure.

Here are all the parts for the injector valve assembly. This regulates the flow of plastic and air into the mold cavity via the shuttle valve sliding back and forth.

Starting hole layout for the melt tank. I kind of wish I had used steel for the tank instead of stainless steel. Stainless is a real pain to work with. It’s hard to cut, hard to drill, hard to bend, hard to weld. Just really unfriendly in general. The original mold-a-ramas used an aluminum tank, but I got a really good deal on the stainless tank I started with to make this part.

Another area where I’m differing from the original mold-a-ramas is the piston design. The original injection cylinder sealed agains the rod of the hydraulic cylinder used to inject plastic for the melt tank to the mold. In my design I have the seal on the piston. I’m very ~~nervous~~ excited to see how well this works. There is another disk, not shown, that will retain the seal against this piston.

A few more from this weekend:

I really need to hire a hand model.

There are a few more bits and pieces that need to be fabricated (frame for cover, water tank, brackets for a few items), but the bulk of it is done. Next up is programming, wiring, and test/debug.

Mold-A-Rama Build Begins

Posted by thingsimdoing

I have spent the last 5 months designing, buying parts, redesigning, and buying more parts. I am finally at the point of cutting metal and bolting stuff together (the fun part). I have to say, it feels pretty good. Below you can see the 80/20 frame (mostly 1010 series with a lower frame made from 1020 series extrusion) , it is still missing a few crossbars near the top, as I hadn’t yet tapped the ends of the extrusion to accept a corner fitting.

I was initially concerned about how rigid the 1010 uprights would be given that the they are only attached to the bottom 1020 frame with two plates each. I found that it holds up surprisingly well to small amounts of force (hand applied), and this is even without the aluminum weldment that fills the space between the two angled bars. You can also just barely make out the waterjet cut 120 degree brackets on the front angle.

No longer just shapes on a computer screen.

I’m also very close to some initial tests with the pneumatics. I have new sensors for air cylinders that interface better with a micro controller, and have started breadboarding the transistors to drive the solenoids valves.

Process Control Using Arduino

Posted by thingsimdoing

This project involved designing a device to regulate the flow of chilled water through a heat exchanger based on the coolant temperature of an internal combustion engine. It’s made up of three parts: A controller, a motorized valve, and a temperature sensor.

The controller consists of an arduino, a LM298 based motor driver, resettable fuse, LCD and misc. buttons/connectors.

The motorized valve is a standard ball valve with a bracket to support a gear motor and a encoder for position feedback.

The operator inputs a desired coolant temperature which is maintained by adjusting the flow through the heat exchanger. During this project I learned about driving inductive loads with a micro controller, PID tuning, and closed loop feedback control.

Machine Shop Madness

Posted by thingsimdoing

Being able to operate basic machining equipment should be an essential skill for every mechanical engineer. It’s really sad how often I hear 3rd and 4th year ME students say they have virtually no practical engineering skills. Granted most ME’s will never be required to operate a lathe or mill as part of their job, knowing the capabilities of the tools that will be producing your products helps you when designing those very same products. College teaches you a lot of equations and methodology, but you don’t really learn anything useful until you start designing and building stuff with your hands. So when I had the chance to take the machine shop course offered by my school I jumped at the opportunity.

Fortunately for me I have access to equipment most home machinists can only dream about. This is a Bridgeport vertical mill with a DRO on the x and y-axis. The device hanging off the right end of the table is a power feed, which comes in handy when making long slow passes in the x direction.

Continue reading →

A Little Machining

Posted by thingsimdoing

Single point threading is pretty wild. You’ve got about 15 levers, dials and knobs to keep track of. If you mess up and cross thread your part you have to start over, there really is no fixing it. Fortunately for me everything went well and a 1/2-20 nut threaded onto the shaft smoothly. This is a practice part before I start machining my actual parts.

Things I'm Doing

Projects and Pastimes of an Engineer

Machining

Mini Lathe PWM Controller Repair CJ0618

Power Supply

Motor Control Relays

Power Switching

Overcurrent Protection

Power Board Control

Building a CNC Mill Stepper Driver

Over Center, Under Pressure

The Apartment Workshop Series: Mini Mill

Sealing it

Build Blitz Weekend 1

Mold-A-Rama Build Begins

Process Control Using Arduino

Machine Shop Madness

A Little Machining