Advice on Controller Board upgrade for CNC 6040

Hi, I’m new to the forum and was hoping for some advice.

I bought a 4 axis 6040 CNC as a home hobbyist and have had great results milling aluminium and also carbon fibre. Both mainly milled for RC car parts and custom builds.

I have a Mk1 controller (JP 3613B) using the serial to usb lead which was working perfectly until my old windows 95 laptop decided to pack up.

After much fiddling I managed to get windows 10 working with the CNC USB program until another issue popped up recently I believe this happened when I upgraded the controller board firmware and strangely it changed the serial number meaning the software will no longer work. I have emailed the software developers to see if they will release a new code to work with the “updated” board - I have no idea how this happened but hey ho...

Based on all of this I am now looking to upgrade the controller board to USB or Ethernet (more stable apparently) but it’s a minefield looking for the correct one to work with all 4 axis, my stepper motors have 4 wires and many online seem to only have 3... am I missing something here..?

Once I have updated the controller board I will go for Maxh3 as this has more functionality than the CNC USB software I’m currently using - from memory I think It’s the Planet CNC one.

I have attached a picture of my current controller board, please give me some advise on comparable boards and also the complexity of changing these, I am competent in wiring but not an electrical engineer [emoji41]


https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...849b15becd.jpg


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