CIB Industrial Control Interface

[antsals]

Anyone ever used the CIB Industrial Control Interface board from Zapp Automation with Mach3 software?
What do people think of the board?

http://www.slidesandballscrews.com/industrial-control-interface-p-341.html?cPath=54

http://www.cnc2all.com/control-card-eng.html

Cheers
Ant

[M250cnc]

Ant never used that board, but it should not be used with stepper drivers that have opto-isolation as well.

Industrial control interface AKA breakout board

Phil

[antsals]

What is opto-isolation?

Cheers,
Ant

[Jonathan]

What is opto-isolation?

Instead of there being a direct electrical connection between the computer and the driver the connection is effectively split with light bridging the gap. The opto-isolator uses an LED and a phototransitor to sense the light. If there is a high voltage on the motor side of the board it cannot reach the other side since there is a physical gap (within reason).

Google it...

You could get round the 'problem' of having both the driver and interface board isolated by buffering it - few logic gates, maybe not even that. Or even pop open the driver and bypass the isolation with a bit of wire! Kind of defeats the object of buying it ready made though, and you're increasing propagation delay which may/may not be significant.

[Gary]

yes it can be used with stepper drivers that have optically isolated inputs.
Any driver that is worth buying has optos built in.

[antsals]

I was going to use these stepper drive units. It does mention opto-isolation. Will they be ok?

http://www.slidesandballscrews.com/2m2280n-high-voltage-stepper-driver-p-304.html?cPath=44_97

Also whats the reasoning that I can't use the opto-isolation. I've googled it but seems to be no-reasoning. In what solution would you use opto-isolation?

Thanks
Ant

[Gary]

They work fine with the CIB.

[Jonathan]

I wasn't thinking last night, disregard what I said earlier. I posted this diagram somewhere on the forum a while ago which shows how to do it:

http://www.mycncuk.com/forums/showthread.php/3019-break-out-board-reccomendations?p=19932&viewfull=1#post19932

see post #22

[Gary]

Connecting the CIB to any of our drivers is very simple.
Connect pin 9 (5V+) to the positive side of the Clock, direction and enable and then connect pin 5 to the Puls, Pin 3 to the Direction and pin 1 to the enable (Free-)