Quote Originally Posted by Zerovis View Post
Hi David ,
I am not sure about that , there are controllers that will , Mach 3 seems to be reliable epically now that the serial port os no longer needed ,
I suppose its limitations is that the processing is done on your PC and sent to the card so a slow Pc could be a problem , where as on the CDE the steps are generated by the card ,
Having said that , I have seen mach 3 running on a Pentium through a serial port to a router , so far the only thing it doesn't do well is a particular type of helical spiral cut but this could be the stepper driver cant keep up , its an old machine he rescued from a skip.

Do you have any idea how to set the steps on the CDE Step1 cards , I have the setting for 400 and 800 steps per rev, but the motors I have are 200 ,
I can use either as Mach3 will send what I tell it to , so if I set to 400 I send roughly half the 800 I want to try them at 200 to see how accuracy is affected
Diarmuid
Hello Diarmuid,
I think I have all of the CDE CNC documentation apart from the latest stepper drive board, the one without the heatsink. If I can send an attachment with a PM I will send the PDF I have, Otherwise it's email or Dropbox, except my Dropbox account needs sorting. :-)

Mach3 not coping with things like the spiral cut are why I went for the CDE system, but this decision was made 10 years ago, things have changed a lot over the last 10 years. I have read it does not matter much about the speed of the machine, it's the Windows background tasks which muck things up by pausing Mach3 at inopportune times. Apologies if i am telling you stuff you know. :-)

The Step 1 cards can be set for loads of steps, the motor may be 200 steps per rev but the card can microstep up to 1600 steps per rev. Alex Mackinnon was brilliant with stepper drives. You would just have to tell the controller the actual number of steps per rev.

I'll try PMing the PDF shortly.

Regards
David