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« on: October 04, 2010, 03:27:52 AM »
I just used whatever cable was available to me rather than a specific brand. The important thing is that it is not solid core as that can crack due to vibration, so the more strands the core is made from the better. As for shielding then best is wire braid shielding for any wires that regularily flex such as motor/encoder wires as foil shielding can deteriorate through time if constantly flexing.
For enclosures, I just used what I had, for example the Bridgeport had two cabinets so I used one, the lathes cabinet I used but the Beaver Mills cabinet was huge so I had a spare sheet of Alu that I welded up into a cabinet.
Here is a pic of the Computer and I/O part of my Beaver mills cabinet, all the drives and contactors etc are below where this board fitted in my cabinet. As can be seen I am not using any shielded wire in this pic as all of these wires are 24v except the Step/Dir which are differential and the spindles encoder inputs which again are differential.
The bottom pic is the whole cabinet, almost wired but not tidied, you can see the shielded cables that go to the drives and I have kept all of the high voltage wires well away from the few 5v signal wires I use except for the encoder wires and these are well shielded.
Hood