Frage Hour counter

Knowing hour many hours will fly by when I get my Stepcraft, I'm sure I'll lose track of how long the machine has been running and maintenance periods will become guess work.

With that in mind has anyone fitted a hour counter to the machine?

Just found this www.conrad-electronic.co.uk/ce/en/product/126618/?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=sea_shopping&gclid=COXl0_ba38QCFQsCwwod508Ang

Not sure how you would connect it though.

Parallel to Powersupply.

And a LM317 that creates 3VDc for the Operation hour-meter.
www.circuitstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LM317-typical-adjustable-regulator-ckt.png

But i guess this is simpler goo.gl/dT893J

Cheers,
Michel

I use UCCNC and that tells you your run time for each session. I write down in a notebook what I have run and how long it took, then reset the timer in UCCNC.

This is pretty low tech compared to a hard-wired counter, but it does have the benefit of letting me review what I've done; if I have a job that took 30 minutes and think it was very similar to another job that took an hour, I will carefully review the hour long job ... I've trimmed run times substantially by this method.

Another benefit is if I have 30 minutes left before maintenance is due, I can see what sort of jobs run in less than 30 minutes. Vcarve Pro (which I use a lot) has a feature to estimate run times but I find it hit and miss when running anything complicated with lots of z-axis movement.

I started just taking notes on loose sheets of paper, but decided it would be better to have a longer term record so moved to a hard back notebook.

The biggest flaw in my system is forgetting to reset the UCCNC counter so I have to write cumulative job times. I have also (rarely) forgotten to note times before shutting down UCCNC. On those occasions I have been able to look up the job time from previous runs.

I feel an after market mod coming on...