RapidChange Automatic tool changer working with X50

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I finally got my OneFinity Journeyman X50 working with the RC-ATC tonight. I have the older OF with the black box controller, not the Elite Masso controller. Since this is more of a hobby than how I make my living these days I keep a pretty tight budget and a pneumatic ATC was just not even close to within my range. When I saw the RC-ATC I was really curious, but heard a bunch of negative sentiment (mostly from people that already had a pneumatic ATC or makers of them). Just looking at the numbers I could buy the RC-ATC and a bunch of replacement spindles and collet nuts if they would actually be negatively affected. It was worth the cost and effort. The owner/founder gave me a good deal on one since this would be an experiment not guaranteed to work and it could open up another community if I got it working.

Normally you hook it up to an input and an output to take advantage of opening the dust shield and then checking to ensure a tool has been engaged with the IR beam sensor. I am not able to use the IR beam sensor as the BB controller does not have a free input that I could use so the best I could do was use an output (Load2) to control the dust cover open/close. The dust cover stepper motors are controlled by a TB6600 stepper motor driver and an ATTiny85 which takes the output from Load2 set as hi-lo and sends the step pulses to the stepper motor.

I am running the 1.4.0 alpha 3 firmware, but I believe this should work with 1.3.X as it is using the Program_Start and Tool_Change code in the settings menu and not currently any macros.

The RC-ATC runs along the Y axis on the front right of the machine and I have a touch probe in front of that to check/set the tool length offset after the tool change. Happy to walk through the details of the project if anyone is interested.

Here is a video of the first tool change.

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I would definitely be interested! I have been interested in the RC-ATC but haven’t had the time yet to do too much research into making it work.

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As long as you have a spindle that can go in reverse you should be good. There are a couple of ways to make it work, but the way I found to work with the BB controller was to tap into pin 1 and ground on the DB25 breakout controller and then go into the fly out menu and go to I/O which will let you enable Load 2 and set it to hi-lo so it goes to ground when activated.

The wire coming from pin 1 goes to the ATTiny85 sensor pin, which creates step pulses (PWM) to control the stepper motor driver which is hooked up to the ATC and open/closes the dust cover.

That was the part that took me a little longer cause I got busy with other projects and life. I believe Don is now sending out the ATTiny85 with the steeper motor driver if you let him know you need one. If not you can also wire up an Arduino to do the same thing. I’m happy to help with either if you need it.

From this point you need to copy and paste some gcode into the program start and tool change fields on the settings menu and make sure your CAM software is outputting a M6 for tool change. I use fusion360 and in the post-process modal popup it is a checkbox on the bottom right of the screen. I also suggest that you add 3-5 seconds of spindle delay to let it come up to speed before cutting with the second tool.

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