Steady Progress! Time for Integration.

Intro

Hi everyone, Cooper back again with a monthly update! We've been moving full steam ahead on development. Lots of isolated testing of ideas and confirmation of their function. We're getting ready to begin initial integration of systems like the Powercore, Wire Tools, and Betta Wire!

As an added bonus, the new Powercore is almost stable enough to begin releasing files on our GitHub, so keep an eye out for that!

Betta Wire

Work on the Betta Wire has been largely focused on wire control and feeding with some initial work being done on the updated electronics cabinet.

Wire Tools

After integration of last month's tools, we found some issues. These issues were related to:

• Wire Energizing
• Wire Guides
• Wire Tension
• Positive Wire Control

When it comes to energizing the wire, our main focus has been simplicity. We want to avoid actuated components and to minimize the number of components total. 

While this would significantly simplify the build and lower costs, it leads to additional difficulties in design. The first design used a simple M5 bolt that slightly interfered with the wire path. The bolt would make good electrical contact with the wire once under tension.

This design caused some issues. While the wire was sent into the wire guide directly after contacting the bolt, there were too many instances of failure with this method.

Moving on to a new energizing design, the team considered a similar technique to what has proven to be reliable for the hole popper electrode. A simple spring connector on a PCB to provide positive electrical connection to the wire.

This method was successful with energizing the wire and successfully prevented misfeeding of the wire. When testing in an EDM scenario, the spring connectors showed no signs of wear or pitting due to current flow or EDM occurring at the contacts.

While promising, more testing was required. The team tested this setup further by running ~1.5 miles of wire through the block. This is roughly equivalent to one of the spools of 0.3mm brass wire we provide.

After running wire through this assembly, the spring connectors were examined under a microscope. Failure of the gold coating was observed. While the components may still function, this was an unacceptable failure and this specific implementation was scrapped.

A new idea was needed. We took this opportunity to add an additional feature to the design. By switching to a larger spring design, we could increase the surface area of energizer and also pre-load the wire against an encoder wheel. This encoder wheel would allow us to directly track wire speed instead of tracking motor speed.

Even when using a thin, stand-in PLA spring, this design applies enough force to the wire to reliably move the encoder wheel. The encoder has been allowing precise command of wire speed in our test rigs.

The spring's long engagement area concentric to the encoder wheel should provide a solid electrical connection for the wire. The team is working on simplifying the spring geometry and is working on fabrication of prototypes. This will allow us to test this method during actual EDM cutting. 

There's a lot more that's been going on with all of the small details of wire guiding and control, but that's where we'll stop for now. If you want to chat more in depth, feel free to join our Discord!

Electronics Cabinet and Dielectric System

As we move to a works-like machine integration, designing the electronics cabinet is now a good use of time. To facilitate an easier and more complete integration of our system, we've completed the first revision of our purpose built controller board.

We'll further simplify the controller board and integrate more custom controls and interfaces. This custom controller board will allow us to lower prices and to optimize assembly and airflow within the electronics cabinet.

Work on dielectric systems has now begun. Primary focus has been on filtering and pumping options. More info on this to come.

Powercore V3

We now have an initial Powercore V3 test board! We've been testing sparking and firmware controls. We have achieved the following milestones for function:

• Pulsing up to 64KHz
• ISO-Pulse Control
• Successful Test Machining of Various Metals

This specific prototype has been hacked, modified, bodged, and overall abused, but it works! It's not perfect, but it works! This is a great milestone for our R&D. 

The next step will be an updated PCB along with a machined aluminum enclosure. Our goal for this enclosure will be to avoid the need for fans entirely. We suspect that the large thermal mass of the machined enclosure and surface area of the fins will negate the need for a fan.

Ideally, we'll be able to move on to a die cast enclosure for production, but we think that even the first few hundred units may be machined. This will give us the flexibility to address any issues that come up.

Quality Testing

As we finish the next versions of the PCB and integrate an enclosure, we will soon begin stress testing. We will cover as wide a band of spark parameters as possible and will attempt to run test units for as many hours as possible. 

We will be building specific test rigs to allow multiple Powercores to be tested simultaneously and for many hours. We really want to increase the overall number of Powercores being tested too. We're leaning towards an initial run of 50-100 test units. This will give us the highest likelihood of catching issues prior to sending out units. Admittedly, this was a significant failure of ours on the Powercore V2 release and we do not intend to repeat it.

Closing Thoughts

We're in an exciting time for development! A couple longer term and rather difficult threads are starting to come to a close. We're looking forward to showing off a works-like, looks-like prototype of the Powercore next month. We're also looking forward to finishing the function tests of the wire tools and to integration of a final tool.

I want to thank all of your for following along and I would like to especially thank all of our pre-order customers who continue to trust us through this process. There is a ton of work to do for our small team, but we're having a lot of success with each of the problems we try to tackle.

We're especially excited to share our work online on our Youtube channel and in person at RMRRF this year in Loveland Colorado! We have a project that we haven't told anyone about yet that we think you'll really like, so consider visiting us there!

I'll be back next month for another update. Looking forward to sharing more progress with you!

-Cooper