Boxford 125 TCL - Mach3 Ports & Pins Spindle Configuration

[Reprobus]

Thanks for your reply, I read it back a good few times on Sunday to try to break it down and understand how the GEC board works, but no unfortunately I have no info on this at present. Indeed my board does appear to have similar connections to your Sprint board although the layout is different.

I’m up for trying the “switch & pot” although I have no idea what a pot is, haha. I won’t be able to try this until next week however as my schedule for this week is pretty crammed

In regards to the two other boards you asked about, the small one is a relay board. It feeds relays 1 and 2 for the motor direction. If the other board is a PWM generator that might explain what my next step is within Mach3 > Ports & Pins > Spindle Setup

Also, I’ve just picked up an old Denford Starmill from a friend so that’ll be the next project once I get the TCL running :)

[John11668]

A pot is a potentiometer . Intended to vary voltage for a number of possible applications .

With these drivers a varying voltage input between 0 and 10 v dc causes a varying output voltage typically from 0 v to 170 volts or so, which will give full motor speed .

Most drives have a 10 v output terminal and a ground terminal across which a 10 kilohm resistor can be connected . A wiper brushing along the length of this resistor will pick up a proportion of this 10 volts from 0v to 10v which is used to feed the input terminal and this is all that a potentiometer does. This in turn causes it to give an output voltage to the motor between a minimum of zero volts which leaves it stationary , to say 170 volts which gives it full chat . This is the simple way to operate and indeed prove one of these drivers. And this is what we are aiming to prove by connecting a pot .

Then In our case we want the computer to send the signal voltage which will vary the motor speed under program control , so the PWM output is used .
This may need to be converted to a 0-10v analog output which many modern breakout boards handle, or I suspect in your case the PWM output may be used to generate a the 0-10v analog input which is needed to control your motor in a separate board . This then replaces the function of the Pot.

A pic of that board would be helpful to try and establish that is correct.