Bridgeport Series 1 Boss3 LinuxCNC Conversion

rwm said:
For those novices among us, this make little to no sense. Unless you are talking about plumbers putty???
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True.
“putty“ is a progam that allows serial connections from a command window (linux shell). There are several others. Minicom is another alternative, probably more common these days.
That way commands to the vfd can be directly entered from the keyboard.
The behavior of the vfd to those commands, and watching the connection status lights, may give some clues to what is happening.
 
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IT'S ALIIIVEE!!

I got control of the motor today. Another thread here was talking about ferrite rings. I've had one sitting on my work desk for a while. . . you know. . . cause everyone has a ferrite bead sitting on their work desk. So I figured it was worth a shot. It is really way too large, but it was handy.
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It's as big as the the converter. I ran the wires through a couple times, and not only was I able to start and stop the machine, then change it's speed, but all the errors that kept incrementing up went away. Stayed solid at zero.

A little more configuration, and I think I'll be ready for a final write-up.
 
Please elaborate. How it the ferrite ring fixing the issue? Was it just noise in the signal?
 
Yep. Noise.
That explains why I was getting a stream of errors, and why the first command would work, but no others. The VFD wasn't running power, so it hadn't yet started generating the noise.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I probably should have checked this sooner.
 
Ahhh. I get it now. I couldn't understand why the first signal would work.
 
First cut!!
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Well, second cut actually.
I messed the first on up right near the end of the program, when I got scared that it was going to go through the 2x6 and into my table.
This is a gcode program that comes with LinuxCNC. It is meant to perform the most difficult operations. Circles, angle patterns and slopes.

It did a pretty good job except my spindle speed was too low. Notice the waviness in the top left angle. I haven't figured out how to make LinuxCNC tell the VFD to go faster, and the mechanical speed change is still broke from where I dropped the mill. I just have to turn a shaft to make that work.
 
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