Quote Originally Posted by komatias View Post
There is nothing wrong with the Ethernet Smoothstepper if you are going to buying a breakout board. The support is fine now, even though in the past it was sketchy. I know Jazz has his opinion on the generic breakout boards and he is justified. To be fair, we have seen countless conversions and builds use the standard 5 axis BOB's and work just fine. The latest incarnations of them will run on 12-24Vdc and even modulate 0-10V for combination with VFD's while being fully optoisolated. You do need to be careful with your cabling and grounding whatever controller/BOB you go for so it is all up to you which one you prefer.

Backlash compensation has been painted as a hack, however even the big boys do it (even when they use ground screws). That is the only way you can use C7 cheap ballscrews and not chase your tail wondering why your circles are not round. If you can afford the C5 with preload or zero backlash then yes you can forego backlash compensation.
Thats interesting! Even if ive bought C7 ballscrews from Chai this time i want to make the machine as accurate as i possibly can.
Im leaning towards the smoothstepper once again. Its got all the fatures, a pretty good rep and there is lots of knowledge out there from people using it.