ROLAND CAMM-2 PNC-2300A Conversion?

**Chimestrike** · 24-10-2016

So in theory, if I wired directly from the steppers to say a grbl board that would be all it needed as that has the stepper drivers and also the grbl firmware on the arduino, then just control the spindle with a relay or similar?

**John S** · 24-10-2016

No idea I'm not into garbled boards and arduino's

**Chimestrike** · 24-10-2016

Fair enough lol, so if I went for a mach3 board with stepper drivers and then removed the standard control board and wired straight to the mach board which I'm assuming is the same principle?

**m_c** · 25-10-2016

Yes.
However, any kind of board with inbuilt drivers will usually not be ideal. Certainly the older TB based boards were pretty unreliable, however I suspect given this application you won't be pushing the stepper driver chips that hard, so it shouldn't be a problem. Most problems seemed to occur when people were trying to push the boards to the voltage/current limits.
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GRBL with suitable stepper drivers would work, but you'd need to see if it will do what you need it to. Although I've looked at GRBL, it was only a quick look a while ago, so I have no idea of it's current capabilities.

**Chimestrike** · 25-10-2016

To be honest it's not going to be doing hard work its mainly going to be a bit of engraving and some pcb work mainly with the odd bit of thin cutting, so I would guess its not going to have a hard life in that respect. It's mainly to overcome the fact that 'dr engrave' while being great for the early 90's is a bit useless now and well I want to keep the machine going and this seemed a good plan.

GRBL would be good as I have a board, but I really don't know as both will do the job and it's really going to be for my hobby builds so nothing too critical as such.

**Chimestrike** · 25-10-2016

I've just seen a diagram that has cleared this all up for me in respect of controller and driver boards, sorry all was being a bit dense

**Lee Roberts** · 25-10-2016

Hey if you dont know, you dont know!

At least now you do know and can help the next man when he comes along needing help :).

Good luck with the conversion, dont forget to do a build log so we can see your progress and success.