Moving home [x0,y0,z0]to "Detonador Space"

For this assingment, we have moved to a space located in the district of Barranco, Lima-Peru. It's called Detonador Workshop, and it's my older brother's space. Several activities related to art and architecture operate here. Barranco district is located on the coast of Lima, next to the sea, a place full of cultural, artistic life and tourist activities. In our usual laboratory Fab Lab Lima, we don´t have a CNC Router to cut wood and we don´t have enough space to carry out this type of task. Here, we have many tools for wood and metal work, plenty of space and we are outdoors for better sanitary conditions.

I had a half-assembled CNC Router at home, I mounted it in the car and took it to Detonator. Now we have a medium CNC that we are going to implement to take on this challenge. So together, with Mayra Ascencio, and the Fab Lab Lima Team we got down to work! First, I designed the table on which we were going to put the CNC Machine. I used Rhinoceros and then I cut the pieces out of 18mm Plywood. In the workshop we assembled it and installed the slaughter table.

Homogeneos Residence Lab is a project under construction housed inside the Detonator workshop. It is a digital manufacturing laboratory as well as a traditional one. This space allows the artist, scientist or creator, national or international, to carry out a residency to experiment on the subject they want. At this residency, the emphasis is on providing follow-up and support during the resident's creative process. The resident will finally decide whether or not to expose their research. This space aims to provide the community with a valuable exchange of knowledge between cultures. We are carrying out the implementation of this laboratory right now, which will have CNC cutters, 3D printers, laser cutters, tools to make sculptures, electronic components and even audiovisual equipment.

The CNC Router Machine

Two years ago, we acquired this CNC machine, it is approximately 20 years old and it was built as part of the thesis of the electronic engineer Jorge López, we thank him very much for his contribution. It is based on a manual router, motors and belts. The entire electronic system is very old and some parts have been replaced by more modern parts, such as the motherboard. Now it works based on Arduino, but the drivers are the original ones, huge! So we have a great hybrid going.

GroupTask

The group assignment this week is about testing our machine, test runout, alignment, speeds, feeds and tool paths and we have to document this entire process. Next we will see the arduous process that we take to start the CNC and have our first test. For this we needed to get many things, for example, the cutters for cutting, the programs to manipulate the machine, the material that we would cut (wood), a vacuum cleaner, screws, screwdrivers and many more tools that we would probably find in the workshop Detonador.

Recognizingthe GRBL

We'll start with the perse machine. A year ago I had installed an Arduino UNO alongside a CNC Shield Board, which already had the GRBL loaded on the board. The GRBL is open source firmware that runs on an Arduino UNO that converts G-code commands into step-by-step signals. Our machine works based on 4 stepper motors, in the three axes X, Y, Z and has an extra motor in the Z axis. Unfortunately none of our laptops recognized the Arduino and we could not control any axis, 0 movement. To solve this, we had to update the USB port driver on all of our computers and we were able to recognize one machine.

Components of our CNC:

• It works with 12-36 V DC.
• 1 x CNC shield
• 1 x CNC shield
• 1 x Arduino UNOR3 board
• 4 x original drivers.
• 4 x stepper motor
• 1 x USB cable