Wobblycogs CNC Mk2

[Wobblycogs]

I'm with you on this Neil. My spreadsheet currently shows it's going to cost in the region of £3200 although I think there are some savings to be made on materials. A £40 (maybe £80) saving would be nice and I'm thankful for the suggestion but at the same time I have to weigh that up against the fact I'm very time poor and spending a little extra to walk a well trodden path feels like a reasonable investment.

It's basically the same reason I've chosen to go the Mach3/ESS route. I'm sure I could get LinuxCNC to work with a cheap BOB but the days of me being able to spend 40 hours a week in the shop are, sadly, a distant memory. I'm also interested in trying to write applications to directly control the machine and doing that via the ESS looks like it would be significantly easier than trying to do it through the parallel port and dealing with the exacting timing issues (this could be very naive of me though).

Neil, would you'd be interested in a combined purchase of the AM882's Jonathan linked to?

[JAZZCNC]

Hang fire with the ESS/PMDX?spindle control because I've just received the Csmio-IP-M Today form Zapp and so far it's looking like a fantastic bit of kit that I feel is going to change my view on ESS/PMDX preference.!! . . Esp has I can get from Gary @ Zapp without all the crap of buyng from US.

It's very very neat and you can see it's been design with industry in mind has it's all DIN rail mounted with good quality terminal connectors and it uses 24v inputs/outputs.
Comes with spindle control built in and it's giving a super stable accurate RPM straight from the box, no messing with de-bounce or any thing like that like you can have with cheap spindle boards. Two Relays on board for controlling For/Rev.

Loads of Digital Input's/outputs all 24V signals.

So far I've only hooked it up to some AM882 and 3Nm motors on the bench but I can tell from way motors sound and the speed and smoothness I'm getting from them it's giving super smooth pulses. You can always tell nice clean pulse's when the motors are turning slow or spinning very fast and these sound sweet.!!

I'll be throwing all this lot on a machine shortly but before that I'm going to hook it up to my machine so can give it a good thrashing and compare it to ESS and the Russian PLCM-E3P(which it's currently running) also the old USB-SS. Will probably throw a thread up when I've played more, Rest assured I'll do my best break it.! . Lol

[Wobblycogs]

I saw you mention you'd got a Csmio on another thread. I have to admit it had me interested but I couldn't find much else about it so went with the standard setup.

It certainly sounds like a top quality solution. If it's as good as you think and comes in at roughly the same sort of price I'll be more than happy to switch over, I await your review with bated breath :)

[JAZZCNC]

It certainly sounds like a top quality solution. If it's as good as you think and comes in at roughly the same sort of price I'll be more than happy to switch over, I await your review with bated breath :)

It's very high quality and looking brilliant so far. It will come in much cheaper than ESS/PMDX combo has you won't need the Pmdx126 or 107.

[Clive S]

Dean Will it slave the x motor. I thought only the S version did. But could be wrong. ..Clive

[JAZZCNC]

Dean Will it slave the x motor. I thought only the S version did. But could be wrong. ..Clive

Not got that far yet Clive but I think it does but just not within the unit with advanced features like -S model has and just leaves it down to Mach to control in normal way. Not sure how it will handle Homing etc but I'll try to test it out when get time.

For my use on intended machine then it's not required so I'm not concerned about that and has you know I try to avoid slaving anyway.

[Wobblycogs]

I'm must be missing some understanding because I've never seen anyone set up a machine in the way I'm about to suggest but I can't immediately see anything wrong with it...

Imagine a machine with dual x-axis steppers, why can't you just wire both stepper driver control lines in parallel to the x-axis connector on the BOB?

I can see that the signal strength (current) may be a problem as it will be halved but that doesn't feel like it would be insurmountable. If the machine is set up correctly wiring in parallel looks like the same end result as, for example, the slave feature of the PMDX-126.

Am I right in thinking that the step line indicates that the stepper should take a step by going high and then the direction line is high or low depending on the direction of rotation? Is there any other signalling taking place along these lines?