Boxford 125 TCL conversion advice

[depronman]

I feel I need to add that I am far from being the most experienced on here so maybe not best placed to advise you but at least I have gone though the TCL mill and made a few mistakes. I am confident that Mach3 will not do your job. I looked at Mach 4 , but was not prepared to shell out for the license until the M4 folks could convince me it worked and I never really got a satisfactory answer. They haven't even got around to writing the manual yet and I understand it has been around for ten years or more .
Linux it seems has to operate though a parallel port so an older machine has advantages but if you wish to use your TCL keyboard you will need an additional PP too. Those however with current wisdom seem to favour Ethernet controllers which give lots more scope for the inputs from your buttons.

I am having an intermittent problem with missing steps at the moment so still got a bit of work before I can consider my own task successfull

Not exactly true about linuxcnc needing a parallel port or two
You can use linuxcnc through a mesa board in any pc with a spare pci slot and as such don’t need the parallel port however cost are rather high for the Mesa boards into the £300 price tag for just the boards
They do give an almost unlimited amount of input and output pins but at a great cost

As John says linuxcnc will happily run an older pc hardware with the parallel port on board plus you can add a further port(s) with pci cards for a few quid each
I have an orac lathe and a boxford VMC190 mill both running on linuxcnc using 2 parallel ports in each pc
This gives me enough input pins for a reasonable control panel and the total cost of the PC’s parallel port cards cables BOB’s etc is under the £50 mark
I use the lathe and mill a lot and neither have ever missed a beat, lost steps or done any another weird shit that mach3 used to do a lot of the time

There is however a learning curve with linuxcnc configuration, the manual is very good but written for techies but there is an helpful community of users that know a lot about how it works and how to configure it
The step and config wizard will get you a basic set up for the lathe in about 20 mins the complexity comes when you start wanting to add buttons and knobs to the control panel

Does your tcl125 have a manual or automatic tool changer. If manual then the basic config in linuxcnc is a simple job with the config wizard but if the auto tool changer is being used that this element will involve manually updating the Hal and ini files

In summary don’t rule out the parallel port as it is old be well tried and tested and cheap plus it is far better than a usb connection but not as good as an Ethernet connection (which is a LOT more expensive)

Would be a no brainer if the lathe was a large industrial machine needing servos etc

Close loop steppers are not really needed. My orac holds tolerances of 0.0005” all day over dozens of components and is running the standard stepper motors at 60volts with modern stepper drivers. No close loop steppers on that machine

All the best. Paul


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