Quote Originally Posted by booski View Post
I'm curious whether there's any interest in this sort of thing as more brushless spindles come about? I've not seen anything like it before.
Yes I should think there is, at least for Mach 3 users. A long time ago I made a simple circuit using a PIC12F683 to interface between the parallel port PWM output and a standard ESC. However I didn't use it for long since, in addition to getting a standard spindle, I switched to LinuxCNC for which someone has already written the code to make the parallel port output the correct PWM signal for an ESC.

On a related topic, I recently put the motor I originally made into a spindle on to my Mum's bike. For that I used one of the electric bike speed controllers from eBay and added hall-effect sensors to the motor. As one would expect, it's far better than the sensorless controllers, especially at low speed, so if I was to make another brushless motor spindle I'd definitely control it with a similar controller:

48V/600W brushless controller for E - bike & scooter | eBay

They're also programmable, so you can set the current limit among other things, which could be useful for this application. I'll post a picture when I've got it off the other computer...