Equipment/Dahlgren Wizzard 2000 ST

From London Hackspace Wiki
PCB Mill/Micro CNC
Hackspace Unknown.png
Model Dahlgren Wizzard 2000 ST (heavily hacked)
Sub-category defunct
Status Unknown
Consumables Unknown
Accessories Unknown
Training requirement Yes
Training link Unknown
Owner LHS
Origin Donated
Location Basement, Robotics/CNC area
Maintainers Martin_p

This is a project to convert a CNC engraver to also allow it to operate as a CNC pcb drill. The Engraver is a Dahlgren Wizzard 2000 ST. Currently, the engraver is actively worked on by Martin_p, and for the time being lives on the floor in the arts/crafts corner. The original roadmap/discussion has been moved to discussion for this page.

This wiki page is not written in a chronological order, and relevant sections will be updated as the work progresses. I am using my phone camera for taking the pictures, so please excuse their poor documentation-only quality. Please feel free to contact me with any suggestions, or correct any errors or omissions.


Resources

All resources, PCB designs and arduino C++ files live on GitHub. Feel free to look around and/or contribute (but please email me first).

Mechanics

Original state (without cover) - full view

Original state

Apart from lots of dirt and a bit of rust, the mechanical parts were in a reasonable order. The most important missing bits were:

  • 3x NEMA 23 motors
  • 2x 6mm flexible coupling
  • z-axis pulley (6mm shaft)
  • working bed
  • main motor and belt between the rotary tool bit and the motor
  • bit mounting mechanism (only a torso of it left)



Electronics

Original state

Electronics was split into 3 boards - driver/power source, a 386 controlling board and a front display/buttons board.

Driver board

The driver board was in a good shape, and seemed to be relatively easy to hack. The power source is 35V (motors) and 5V (electronics, stabilised), and works beautifully. The middle part contains a 6-phase motor driver, and will probably not end up used in the end. The stepper motor drivers are older versions, but fully functional, hardwired to use 1/10 substeps, and 800mA peak current.

Control board

The 386 machine refused to cooperate because of the missing main motor, and as it would be very hard to reverse-engineer it anyway, I went with the suggestion from the original discussion and ditched it.

Display/buttons board
Front panel

The front board contains a set of buttons, a HD44780-compatible two lines LCD display and 3 pots, all in a very hackable working order.


Arduino

Pin assignment
pin meaning
serial D0 RX
D1 TX
X+Y D2 step X
D3 dir X
D4 enable X+Y
D5 step Y
D6 dir Y
Z D7 enable Z
D8 step Z
D9 dir Z
D10 piezo shift reg
LCD D11 clk 0 RS
D12 data 1 R/W
D13 strobe 2 clk
3 (not connected)
4 bit 4
5 bit 5
6 bit 6
7 bit 7


Software

All sources live on GitHub, both for Arduino and for Linux side (not yet implemented).

Original state

Because I decided to ditch the 386-based control board early on, the original state was non-existent.

Arduino

The main part of hard work is done by an Arduino Nano. It is connected directly to the motor drivers, endstops, display and buttons. It receives its data via a USB/RS232 serial port.