So.....Close......

OK, so over the weekend Nate and I finished getting (almost) everything we need and wiring up all the electronics for the CNC so we could start testing it. Sunday evening we plugged it all in, launched Mach3, and entered our first bit of G-code.

Nothing.

Checked and rechecked the wiring. Confirmed that the motors were receiving power. Tweaked the settings a bit. Still nothing.

The following morning I called Probotix, the guys who we bought the electronics from, and they helped me confirm that the fault did not lie with what we got from them; the computer simply wasn't talking to the breakout board. Feeling out of my depth (electronics and Windows computers are not my area of expertise), I decided to try the one thing I could think of that might help: reinstall the driver software. I call Nate and tell him what I learned from the Probotix guys (very helpful and patient, I would highly recommend them) while I waited for the computer to restart. While I had him on the phone, I tried testing the setup again.

Success! The motors MOVED!

Thinking I was close to finishing, I started installing the motors on the machine. Then I noticed that some of my tweaking from the other day meant that I'd have to do some rebuilding to make things line up again. Ok, very doable, I figured I'd still be done by the end of the day. Unfortunately, I forgot about the small 10-pin ribbon cable I needed to get until just after the two electronics supply places in the city were already closed. So now I have a CNC machine with all three motors mounted, but electronics that's only capable of running two of them at a time. Today I have DesCom, which means not much time for the machine, but damn it, I will make time get those wires and finish the thing TODAY!