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Hi everybody, this is Jim Kemp with 705 CNC. Hey, I recently started a project where I'm using these small, uh, LCDs, 1.28 inches, and they're just cute as heck. They're 240 by 240 pixels, and there's a lot of support out there for them. There's a nice connect to an Arduino or even a Raspberry Pi, but the Arduino, or the Arduino itself, is a little slow. The ESP32 seems to drive it really well, so with their driver and, uh, some videos out there, which I'll link in the description below, there's the first video is a guy that goes through setting up the hardware and getting the display just working. And then there's a much longer video, another guy that goes through setting up the Arduino environment and getting all that working, and then, you know, how to actually, uh, drive the display. You know, there's some tricky parts trying to get a moving graphic to slide over the top of another one. Uh, yeah, that, that's a bit complicated. And actually generating the artwork, I'll have a separate video where I go through how I did it, and I'll release all my source code, so you could just drop this into an ESP32 through the Arduino environment and should have view up and running.
So I'm making a vacuum gauge. Uh, I actually need a vacuum gauge. I've got an application. I've got a, a VF5, a Haas VF5, and I've got a vacuum chuck in there, and I'm trying to control a vacuum pump to maintain the vacuum. And right now, you have to kind of stand there and monitor the thing to make sure that you maintain vacuum. If you generate a small leak, you know, when the machine's moving around, the hoses are getting flexed, and tiny little leaks develop. So you have to keep cycling the vacuum pump on, you know, every four or five minutes, you'd have to turn the pump back on and draw the vacuum back down. So this gauge is going to monitor the vacuum for me using a sensor and automatically turn the pump on and off for me. And so it's just going to have a relay output. There'll be a second, there's actually two relays on the little board. The second relay, I'll wire into an alarm, so we can have an audible alert that, you know, the vacuum pump is has got a leak so bad that it can't keep up. And potentially even wire that into the VF5 so that it would stop cutting if the vacuum isn't, you know, drawn down to a certain level.
So, you know, you can get these displays on on Amazon for 20 bucks. Turns out if you do a little digging and searching and willing to wait a couple of weeks and get them directly from China, I think these things are down to like under $10 a piece for these displays. So, you know, you get an ESP32 for $10 and you get a display for $10. You know, that's if you were going to make a bunch of these. But, you know, for me, I'm using an ESP module, it's probably, I don't know, $15, and the display is $20. So, uh, you know, this, the actual vacuum sensor is way more than all that combined. So, so that's fine.
So this video is kind of a long video. It's all about making an aluminum housing for the display. So, you know, I started with just making a 3D printed thing. So this is just a ring that's got a notch. You know, there's a, there's a big notch in the bottom of the display, so there's a notch, and and this thing just bolts together, and this didn't really work out so good. I mean, it's okay, but you had to glue the display in and then screw it down. So a much better version is, uh, this one that, don't you go lay down, don't you knock my camera, don't you do that again. So anyway, uh, 3D printed version, uh, but I, you know, CADed this up with the intent of actually machining it out. So tried to make this as easy to machine as possible. Turns out it's still not so easy to to machine as you'll see in the video. But so the display bolts into this thing. So let's see if I can show that here. This guy just keys through here, sits down in there, so this pops in there like that. And then on the back, there's a couple of ears that screw down to those little brass inserts that they've they've attached to the back of the circuit board. So this is designed to to have those bolt down like that, and then have a ring, a bezel that holds on top of that, and then that allows you to mount into the panel or whatever you want to do.
So for me, I'm going to use this little, little housing I made. So this thing just slides in, but then it lets me have a knob at the bottom, and then it's got some magnets on it that lets you snap it down to the top of the control panel on the Haas. So, uh, I've done a couple of cool things, I think. Uh, I don't know if you can see this, but it's got what's called a gauge bug. You can see it rotating around the outside of the display. You know, what, I'll switch to a better camera. GoPro just won't focus close up. I'll, uh, I'll record a video of this close up so you can actually see the stuff working better. But anyway, the next hour is all about machining this aluminum case, and hope you enjoy it. Thanks a lot.
So this little, more close up, and you can see the, uh, gauge bugs that I programmed to move around the outside. So basically, when the vacuum gets above this one, it'll shut the vacuum off. And then when the vacuum goes below the red one, uh, the vacuum pump will turn back on. And then it's got a little blinking LED in there that just shows you, you know, if it's below or, I think it's below the, yeah, into the red, it flashes red. And anytime it's green, and you're good to go. So, uh, yeah, that's about it. So it's got the ESP32 module down here. It's got the encoder knob. Unfortunately, I have to put some pull-up resistors on here because the ESP32 doesn't have pull-up resistors programmable. So, and then this one's just kind of stripped down in terms of wiring, ready to go into a housing. So, yeah, it's kind of the hardware up close and personal.
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Okay, step number one, I think, is going to be to face this thing off. Just came out of the saw. So we'll throw it up on, uh, it's one, two, three, one, two, three, two parallels here and, uh, face this baby off. Let's take that, take that burr off. We don't want that goofing off the probe. It's a shaft for the probe would be bad. Do it.
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Thank you.
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Four and a half inches a minute, about a thou and a half chip flow. For two, except I'm missing one of the T's. So a little deeper chip flow, silky. I'll bring you and show you. Nice. Okay, to face that, I got a custom little program I use over and over and over again. So all I have to do is change the values at the top here, top bit of it, and it just makes small little passes to do a facing operation. So I can just set how deep I want it to go, you know, starting and ending depth, depth of cut, feed plane, safe height, X starting and, uh, Y coordinate, the tool number, you know, and then you just tell it, you know, tool diameter, feed rates, and that kind of crap. And then from there, it just, it just does its thing to face down. So, uh, not very long code, but use that little program over and over again for simple stuff like this. Okay, this is the CAD file, and that doesn't look too dissimilar from what we've got 3D printed. And that's all going to come out of this aluminum rod. This is a two-inch square, and the main part of this is under two inches, so should fit. So let's see if I can take this thing apart. Hide that. Oh, hide that. Hide the knob. Pot. Victor. There's a lot of. So this is how the LCD sits in this first part. So there's a little mounting. And hide that part. Hide him for a second. Yeah. So the LCD comes with these little mounting bosses here, right? So that's what the LCD is going to mount to. So let me bring the other part back. So some of the tricky stuff is we have to machine out this little notch for the LCD. Uh, oh, and then putting these holes on the side. Luckily, we've got a square block to start with, so we can just rotate the block and the vise to machine those in. So that shouldn't be too bad. Uh, these little holes are number 256, so those will be a little pucker factor. So let me hide the LCD here. So hopefully this will be easy to machine. You know, I put all these, these, uh, radii in so it would make it easier for the cutter to get in there, no square corners. So same with down here, right? There's a nice wide radius for the cutter to get in. So this thing is about a half an inch thick, so not too bad. Let's measure the outside diameter of this guy. It's, uh, inch and seven eighths in diameter, so just under two inches. So it should all work out. So now it's just a matter of building up some tool paths for this thing. That's the next step.
Okay, so now we're going to pick up the center of the block and re-touch off, basically.
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Yeah, it should be fine.
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Let's see.
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What's up? Looks good. The button is going bad for the, uh, tool change. This button up here, I press this thing, uh, tool release. Yeah, I'm gonna have to replace the button, looks like. Anyway, those tools look like they'll work. So this will let it rip. See what happens.
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Plunge because that's often air. Now we're doing a 100 inches a minute, four and a half inches a minute, 0.1 inch depth of cut, super slow. Not quite sure that's low.
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It took forever. Today we finally got the outside done.
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So now we can start ripping on the inside. So, yeah, that could have gone a lot, a lot quicker. All right, give this thing a shot. It's gonna go a little faster this time.
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600 SFM. The inside of this looks good. Oh, legends, chamfer, but other than that, looks pretty good. A couple extra tools I got to load up. So number 50 for the, uh, 256 tap. This is the clearance drill, and this is the actual, uh, tap, if I can get that out of there one-handed. 256 tap. Hard time focusing, but anyway, a little deals in, touch them off, should be good to go.
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Okay, this is going to, uh, just drill chamfer and drill the holes. So we'll see how that goes.
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Just taking the edge off. Oh, those corners would be heavy because we left material behind from the eighth inch grooves. Should have done some rest milling, clean those out. Grooves.
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Yeah, it's finally starting to cut. All right, a little rip. So it looks like that drilling works. You'll survive. Now I'll drill the four inside holes. Okay, drilling off.
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And it's looking pretty sweet. Let's keep going to do, but short of that, looks pretty freaking nice. All right, this is the worst part. I hate tapping for the first time, but everything looks like it's set up right. So let's see what happens.
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Okay, clearly going in 0.2 inches. I'll finish doing it by hand.
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Always freaks me out. First time. That's it. Done. We're well with that side. So let's use the cutoff saw and put the holes on the outside. But getting closer. Yeah, I wish I hadn't taken this thing out. Uh, two things. Well, first, right down in here, uh, the cutter was too big. You know, I used a 3/8, and it left some material down in these two corners. So I should have used some rest milling to clean those out. So I think I'm going to put it back in here and try and get those out. Otherwise, the corner of the LCD is going to hit there. You'll see that later. The other thing is, you know, I didn't, I only asked for, uh, fifteen thousandths chamfer, but the chamfer just looks huge. Uh, uh, I don't know. Now that I look at it in the simulator, it's pretty big too. It looks like what I got. So next time I'll lower that down. It's a little, little much on the chamfer. It's almost getting into these screw holes. But at least I didn't break a bloody tap. So put it back in. We'll try and do the rest milling on these two little corners, and, uh, yeah, hopefully I get it all lined up. So we'll see.
All right, let's see if we can pick up the X and Y again here. Let's start with Y. All right. Okay, grab that. All right. And we've got this feature towards the bottom, like it's supposed to be. This is oriented right away, so should go in here and rest mill on these corners, clear that out. It's a little, uh, 3/16 flat end mill. We'll try that next.
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Jesus, he does this right.
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Probably could have done a little better if my lead-in, lead-out.
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That's it right there.
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If you can see that, but it looks a lot better. I can't tell if the camera's focusing or not. Yeah, those corners are cleared out now. Asimo. Uh, this is just putting the holes along the side. So you have to turn it three times around. And first he does a little center drill, I'm gonna drills it through.
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And it finishes the hole.
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Finishes the hole with a number two center drill, just drills down to depth, putting the chamfer on the hole.
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The third and last one. So should be all done. Okay, everything's set up right, correctly. This should just cut this thing off, and then we put it back in the mill and face it up. So see if we can get this to happen.
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Well, I was hoping not to have that floor through there, but oh well, we can still mill it off. Okay, cutting that thing off in the, uh, horizontal saw was a mistake because now I got to try and finish this thing, and I had to come up with this really sketchy setup to do it. Everything wrong is wrong with this setup. You know, I couldn't put it in the middle of the vise because stuff would fall through the center of the vise, so I had to offset it. The, the V blocks are too tall, so they wanted to pinch in at the bottom, so I had to put, don't tell anybody, some Joe blocks along the bottom, and then parallels sitting on top of those to get the part setting up level. So it's just catching this thing, and yeah, and then if you crank down on the vise at all, it's just going to crush the part, and it's a horrible setup, but, you know, for a single part, don't tell anybody. So I think I got lucky. So I stopped it halfway through and pulled this out before it got tangled up. Amazing. The, yeah, got lucky this time. Pretty cool. I think I'm gonna stop here before I push my luck too far. Yeah, that was a mistake taking it out again. Should have left it in there because now I have to, uh, cut these down to the right height because I don't have a screw long enough to fit through there. So it's got to go back in my cheesy setup and try and, uh, re-indicate this thing back in, just so I could cut these things down. But that's the way it goes. Frustrating. Good girl. Like 20,000 steps of gut going half the normal feed rate, 12 inches a minute. So the factor. Well, this thing didn't turn out too bad. It's not the best. You know, it's got some, some witness marks around the outside here that I'm not too proud of. And yeah, there was some sketchy, uh, setups involved, and there's some, uh, rest material in here that should have been removed, rest machining, because now this guy won't fit on here because the, depending on that rest material being out of the way. So that kind of sucks. But the LCD seems to fit in here pretty good. See if I can get this down in here. Yeah, so that drops down in there like that, and then the little screws go in the back. If I could do this easily, one, just put two in. So, yeah, all bolted in there, and then that, the next step would be make this out of aluminum. So then this goes over the front, makes it look nice. I get it lined up. See there it goes. Yeah, so, yeah, next up, make this out of aluminum instead of 3D plastic.
Okay, here we go again. I got the, uh, stubby end mill mounted back in there, and we're going to get the, uh, the bezel ring out of this one now. So get this one lined up.
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Try again. That looks better.
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Okay, we're gonna start by facing this thing off, a big face mill.
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Trying to figure out where this thing should start and stop. Seven, and we want to about there. One Y, A, maybe there. Wrench. All right, let me put all those numbers into my program. Okay, should be good to go. Jesus. Well, that's right. All right.
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Should make two passes here, taking 20,000 off each time, super slow and easy. I know, but you're only doing one part. More about not making mistakes than getting it done fast. With
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Yeah, that's soapy right there. Good to go. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. I love that show mill. Let's even got missing tooth. Broke the set screw off. I don't know how to get it out easy. I don't want to take the time to EDM it out. So amazingly, seems to cut just fine with five teeth instead of six. Who knew? Yeah, I should get another one though. This just doesn't seem kosher. This is, uh, it says in there somewhere. I thought it was a SARS. See the name on it? Peace. No, it says right there. Yeah, SARS, right there. Yep. I'll get another one, I guess. That sucks. Always forget this part, to reset the Z after I face something off. I've gotten burnt with that so many freaking times, and all you have to do is just come in and touch the Z again. Good to go. We just have to remember to do it.
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All right, trying to make sure it doesn't crash in the material or anything. Kind of scary. 600 SFM, one and a half thousand, two. That's because if I could have done the whole thing in one goal, but again, if you're making one part, I don't mind taking a little extra time. Looks good. Let's pull far.
Okay, for this last set of cuts, we're going to put the chamfer on the outside, put the really big chamfer on the inside, fill the holes, countersink them, and even chamfer the holes. So a lot of chamfering, some drilling and counter-counterboring. So, but it all should go pretty quick, 12 minutes according to simulation.
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Oh, that's irritating. There it goes. All right, did I reset the Z height? I don't think I did. Yeah, damn it.
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Always forget. Oh, I did that. It didn't change. No, it's still good. And on my second. Oh, Jesus. All right, figured out what happened. The center drill and the drill are on the same tool number. So try to use the center drill as the drill after you're finished center drilling. So that was just stupid. So I think it's fixed. Should be good to go.
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Should be okay. Hopefully the countersink will erase with the center drill did, but we'll actually see. Super stupid.
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Should things okay. Here comes the countersink. See how that works out. Just doing the hole first. She's just barely touching it. Jesus. Oh, it's spiraling down in. That's what's going on. Instead of doing a lead-in, lead-out, there wasn't any room, so I had to do a spiral with plunging and Z while it's spiraling down, spiraling down in Z to get to the right depth. The way it works out.
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Uh, it's nice trying to, you're starting to do the outside contour.
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Ten thousandths. So we've got a thousand chamfer, I should say.
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Hopefully it didn't crash on that thing in the center. This looks like it is just a nice healthy dirty thou chamfer, 40, if you remember. The next one is going to be 60 in the same spot. I was afraid of taking it all in one goal, so broke it up into a couple of passes. Yeah, so there's a second pass, 40, I think. Jesus. See what it looks like. Let's pause it here instead of it doing another one. We will stop the spindle and jog the Y axis, jog away, have a look, see if you want to continue.
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Yeah, let's try another one.
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Back brush your fingers. Come on, baby. It's not so bad. That's making me nervous.
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I don't know. Yeah, I think that's gonna be fine. I think we go with that. Yeah, this can be fine. That's deep enough. And if I made the chamfer any deeper, up, I made the chamfer any deeper than these little gaps around the screw might look goofy. So I think we're going to go with that. So now we're going to try and work our nerve up to use this bad boy to free him. That's what I should have used on the other part too. It's going around there with this guy. Oh, actually go this way, but yeah, this thing always, always makes me crazy, but got to be done, man. I hate you saw, but when it works, it works great. Nice when it works. That turned out awesome. Even the back side looks pretty good. All those little countersink holes. I can't wait to see what that looks like bolted on there. Awesome. So that turned out pretty awesome. I think it looks pretty slick. Damn thing won't focus. I don't know why, but pretty happy with it overall. So still got some more to do, put in the, uh, the rest of the housing, but, uh, you get the little, little bugs working down here so they can zip around. But that is looking pretty slick. I can't believe it took a whole flipping day, but it is what it is. It's way better than this crappy 3D printed plastic. Didn't look too bad, but it's going to sit ultimately, a little gauge doing her thing, and it's going to control this vacuum pump down here. So this vacuum pump is going to get cycled on and off to keep the vacuum in the tank for our big huge vacuum fixture inside the machine. So pretty cool.