A Test Flight

Heres a test run on the machine in its original incarnation. The first motor we tried for the cropping action was too small. You can be hear this from the cogging when it crops(the motor stall noise, not the chunking of the cutter).

We then uprated the crop motor to a larger NEMA 23 motor. It makes a heck of a difference on the cropping force, and the cogging noise is now gone. (I will post a video of the new motor and performance soon)

Also its the first movie made entirely on my iphone, yes its not the best but at least its an early video of the product.

The Machine so far.

And here it is... The first prototype machine that we have built, its currently all hanging off a piece of MDF, we have ordered a nice piece of 4mm Aluminium and hope to get this machined up to directly replace it.

Its quite a tidy little unit and in tests today we have been really happy. We managed to run off a ton of wire to complete an order we had for wiring looms.. Yey!

Just need an automatic crimper now... I can see it now.. Crimp It !

The Brains

This for now forms the brains behind the system, its a prototype board Stuart uses for knocking up quick systems.

Its based on a pic 16f887, as you can see we have wired a 15way d-type to it to connect to the 3 axis controller card. Bottom left is a connector for an ftdi usb rs232 cable.

The firmware that runs on it is also written by Stuart in assembly. It controls the stepper card, and interfaces to a pc through the Serial port.

Its got quite a nice interface that allows you to control the seperate functions of the cropper, including the manual cut, jog functions back and forth and obviously setting lengths and cut count.

Stepper Control Card

We had this card lying around, a 3 axis controller, we bought a while ago for a small cnc we were looking at building. For now its going to provide the stepper drive for the Crop It!

We only need two of the 3 axis for the job, so if we blow one up at least weve got a spare drive circuit.

I think we got it from ebay for about £50 ish

The project begins...

We started this project in October 2012

The aim:

To make an affordable easy to build wire cropper stripper for use on light gauge component wire.