Today I spent way too long building a small wiring harness to put into my my plasma cutter so that I can hook it into the robot. Some days I wonder if I’m not too meticulous. Granted I could have hacked things in a much quicker fashion but I wanted to be able to easily reverse the modifications I made. So I needed to design a solution that didn’t involve cutting any of the wires or making any permanent changes. I also wanted to ensure that there were no safety issues involved. In other words I needed to make sure that the modifications to allow it robot to turn on the torch would not allow the torch to be started “remotely” if the unit were being used by hand out of the CNC table. The solution involved making a small wiring harness to go between the connector from the torch for the trigger and cup switches and the board. The harness passes the cup switch through while routing one of the trigger switch wires out of the unit where I can connect a patch wire for manual use or patch in the relay on the CNC control box for CNC use. Now when I put the torch in the holder for the CNC table I attach the wires from the relay and zip tie the trigger switch closed. Doing things right often takes a bit of time but does tend to pay off in the long run.

Oh and since I’ve been told things don’t exist if there aren’t pictures… :