[kb0nly]

Got my 3020T-DJ today, took very little time to get it up and running thanks to reading through past posts on here, great site for info though some really seem to hate these machines.. LOL

About the only issues i had was the bad ground to the controller case, which i knew to look for from reading on here, the ground goes to the screw for the left rear rubber foot and its on top of painted metal so i just added a better ground point and that took care of it. The other one was the setup directions, a single sheet that came with it, along with the info i could find on here had the pins wrong for the E-Stop and Probe inputs. Mine was pin 10 for E-Stop and pin 15 for Probe, but the Mach3 auto find took care of setting them correctly.

The only remaining questions i have is the PWM control of the spindle motor and the lighted front panel switches.

The boards in this one look a lot different than some others i found posts on, there is a four pin header on the two boards marked for Spindle PWM control, but before i try hooking that up to give Mach3 control to turn the spindle on and off and adjust the speed i wanted to know the best way to try and determine the pinout on the stepper control board header? The PWM input on the spindle motor controller board is labeled so thats not hard to figure out, but the pinout on the other board is not labeled at all. It would be nice to have that function instead of switching the spindle on and off at the controller.

The other is the switches on the front panel, they appear to have lamps in them and they have the other contact with no connection that i would assume would be ground for the lamps, but i tried a clip lead from the chassis ground to that other contact and they still don't light up. Not a biggie, just thought it would be nice to have an indication its turned on. Any suggestions??

Mine came with a probe port on the back, its a 5.5x2.5mm jack, and i am working on getting a Zero Probe made up, for now i tried it with a piece of PCB material and a couple clip leads to a plug for the jack and sure enough Mach3 did the auto zero perfectly, again thanks to the info on the forum for the button script and setting that up!!

The motor tuning info i gathered from this forum worked great, and after running through calibration on the all the Axis it was surprisingly accurate compared to what some have found. It was well within +/- 2mm on all three after tightening all the cap screws on the machine and lightly greasing the screws to get each axis moving smoothly. Overall i am very pleased and just got done routing a test run on a piece of plywood!

CNC Router 3020T-DJ PCB GCode Test - YouTube

Here is some pictures of the controller so i can show what i found regarding the PWM connection for the spindle.

In this first pic you can see they clipped and bent away one pin of the photocoupler, EL817, for the PWM output for Spindle control. I assume they did this to disable the output, would be easy to bend it back and solder to the component or just replace it entirely.



In this next pic you can see the PWM output on the board, four pins, the same connector and pin count as the connector on the Spindle controller board. Also limit switch inputs, which i plan on adding those soon.



Here you can see the PWM input on the Spindle controller board. Its labeled PWM, +5v, On, Off. And right below that jack and slightly to the right you can see two more photocouplers, EL817's again, labeled PWM and Off.



These boards don't match the other posts at all about adding the PWM control for the Spindle, so hoping someone on here knows!

[kb0nly]

Got it all smoothed out working with Mach3, told it to mill a 1"x1"x1/2" hole in a piece of pine, just scrap i had at hand. The final result according to my calipers is 1.003x1.003x.501... Nothing to complain about as i could do a bit more calibration yet if i really wanted to but my calipers are probably a bit in error also considering they aren't a big dollar item either.

Now to just figure out the PWM control for the spindle.