Friday, September 5, 2014

Wire Feeder Updates

A significant motor control update happened this week.
Chatting with one of the members at our local 3D printer Meet Up, Terry Slocum, about the feeder control design goals has yielded fantastic results.
Terry has much experience coding for motion control so he offered to have a look.
A typical, cold wire feeder found it the welding industry would have three control knobs.
One knob for : overall speed, another for time between pulses, and the third for percentage of "ON" time.
Terry added 2 more potentiometers to the circuit and rewrote the code so it does all these things.
Plus he added some lines in the code to facilitate a retraction option.
Thank you Terry !
I'm very much looking forward to trying to weld again. In a week to 10 days from now ...

Next week is the annual Human Powered Speed Challenge @ Battle Mountain Nevada.
The current crop of top machines and athletes are pushing 83 MPH on a flat stretch of roadway.
Truly amazing seeing these self propelled silent speedster wizz by.
Designing, building, racing speed bikes was a 25 year passion I had.
The best sprint speed I could pedal in competition on the same road was 62 MPH.
This year I'm doing track worker duties. Chucking hay bales, manning radios, general grunt work.



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