Jeremy Fennema

About six months ago The Forge Greensboro had a bit of a problem.  Unfortunately, through a bit of an accident, one of the CO2 lasers caught on fire and was significantly damaged.  No other issues, no one was hurt, and all safety systems functioned as expected, so the only loss was a highly used and useful piece of equipment at The Forge.  This 80W CO2 laser is a Ruida-based, blue box named "BB2".

Directly next to BB2 was an older machine, almost the exact same design, but non-functional and in the process of being rebuilt, named BB1.  While BB1 and BB2 looked very similar, the inside of the machine was a very different story.

This page chronicles my work to build a new BB machine using the more advanced components of BB2 as much as possible, but transferred into the non-burned-up chassis of BB1, creating a new machine, I'm hoping we can call BB8, lol.

10 Mar 2022

Here’s the video showing how far I got tonight. So I ended up doing something a little bit different than I expected to do. I ended up working on the switches and the bed stepper and the controls there. I didn’t get to the laser tube or the water protect primarily because the water protect flow control valve seems to be missing. so instead I worked on the bed raising lowering stepper and got that all sorted out. Apparently BB1 Didn’t actually have up down control buttons so I drilled some holes and added those and redid the wiring so that the stepper would work and you can see that in the video. I also swapped over the control switches and the one USB that was specific to the BB2 controller. That USB also was the one that was busted so I fixed that as well at the same time and reinforced the USB port so that it wasn’t floppy anymore and wasn’t precariously feeling like it was gonna break off. So at this point all three stepper motors are working the one that raises and lowers the bed the X and the Y steppers are all working as expected I still need to connect the laser to control and the water protect but we need to find the water protect flow control valve or we need to buy one if we used the one from BB2 in big red or something.

03 Mar 2022

So the remapping of the electronics and moving the controller worked!

27 Feb 2022

So, going through these both and looking at how it all aligns, I believe this is my best guess for the remapping

26 Feb 2022

Time to figure out how to map all the wiring from the BB1 innards to the BB2 controller.  I guess I should actually use the right phrasing for everything since BB1 and BB2 don't mean anything to most people.  Here are the relative controllers and associated manuals.

BB2 is running a Ruida RDC6442g controller (PDF Manual)
BB1 is running a Ruida RDLC320-a controller (PDF Manual)

So I needed to document the wiring in both first.

24 Feb 2022

Well it worked!  Yay!

21 Feb 2022

Need to find the right manuals for the components so I can see how the control boards work and how the stepper drivers are connected to the steppers first.  Then use that information to come up with a guess for how to remap the BB2 controller to the BB1 stepper drivers.  I found the stepper driver manuals, which took a bit of doing.

2M542 Stepper Driver Manual (PDF)
3M660 Stepper Driver Manual (PDF)

So after reviewing this I was able to come up with a first guess at how to remap the wiring for the BB2 controller to the BB1 stepper driver.

Jan 2022

I made this as my first suggestion for how to approach this project given that BB2 was a charred mess and BB1 was ready for upgrade but it looked like the stepper motors in BB1 weren't compatible with the stepper drivers from BB2.

Here's my suggestion to attack it in "releases", thinking of it in almost an Agile/Scrum type mindset.I think the first release would be to establish the minimal set of functionality, basically, how do we control at least one BB1 stepper from the BB2 controller.  We don't have to transplant everything or make big changes which we might have to walk back from later if we have to go a different route.  We should be able to just run some wiring from the BB2 controller, to the BB1 stepper, with whatever intermediate electronics are needed, and confirm if we can control one stepper.Release two: can we control all three steppers?If release 1 and 2 go well, then I think we can move onto release 3 which would be the "transplant" phase where we move everything we want from BB2, into BB1.  That would be multiple sprints to get done most likely, but in the end we should have one working machine, and one shell and parts.  A final phase would be salvaging anything left on the BB2 shell which could be useful in any context before disposing of it.If we hit an issue with the planned release 1/2, then we know we need a different approach, which would be to get BB1 up and running with whatever is missing (taking anything applicable from BB2, switches, flow sensor, whatever) and buying whatever else is needed.  Then stripping the BB2 case for parts, and I would suggest selling them on eBay as a source of income for the Forge.  Anything that functions, like the control box for example, and worth selling.

Timeline of progress and quick updates

• 10 Mar 2022: Second phase of the Ruida conversion
• 03 Mar 2022: First phase of the Ruida controller conversion
• 26 Feb 2022: Working out the remapping of the electronics
• 21 Feb 2022: First attempt at controlling a BB1 stepper
• early Jan 2022:  the call went out for help to rebuild BB2