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02-01-2019 #1
I was a bit undecided whether I should butt in on this thread or open a near identical one - A coin toss anmd the fact that two others have done the same convinced me to join the thread - I hope the OP forgives me.
The situation is that I acquired a Denford Novamill some 5 years ago and begun the process of converting it to run Mach3 on a PC over a parallel port. When it was almost ready for commissioning I was seduced by 3D printers and spent the time until now building a string of ever more complicated printers. Now I find myself yearning for my old love but having to accept that parallel ports are a thing of the past and that the hard won knowledge of how to rework a CNC mill is now irrelevant. I hope that somebody can answer a few questions
The present status is that I had replaced the Denford Surestep controller with electoronics which were pretty standard then. The principal box shown below has an Optoport V2 board, a Spindle V3 board and three 4.2A Chinese stepper drivers along with a rectifier and filters for the power supply and a DB25 connector for the PC printer port.
Looking at recent conversions there seem to be several options but I would like to keep the costs down - at least until I have it up and running.
1) Mach3 and Smoothstepper. The problem here is purely cost - genuine Smoothstepper boards seem to be from £129 to £325. My question here is: Would a Chinese board such as https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MACH3-4-A...frcectupt=true work in the same way
2) LinuxCNC on a BeagleBoard Black as in https://www.rs-online.com/designspar...machine-part-1 etseq. Again down to cost, will an optoisolator board such as the Optoport V2 perform the same fuunction as Probotix PBX-BB board specified in the above article.
3) Any other pitfalls that you see that I may fall into.
Thanks for any help you can give,
Mike
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03-01-2019 #2
If you already have a Mach 3 license, then I'd suggest a UC100 as the easiest option given you already have a parallel port connection.
Off course, there is no real reason not to use an old PC and parallel port if you want to keep cost to an absolute minimum. Plus you could even use LinuxCNC with that same setup.
It all depends on how much money you'd like spend, how much you want to modify things, and how much time you want to spend getting the setup working (I'm generally wary of things like that beaglebone setup, as I've often found key details are missing, so unless you know the system well, it can take a good bit of reading up/experimentation to get things working).Avoiding the rubbish customer service from AluminiumWarehouse since July '13.
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05-01-2019 #3
Hi m_c,
Thanks for the info. I have about £100 to spend in the first instance but I will be able to commit more once I have got it up and running. The UC100 looked interesting but I think in the end that I have decided to go with the parallel BoB and spindle board and LinuxCNC with either a Beaglebone Black or Raspberry Pi - the BBB seems to be most often recommended but I have a couple of Pis hanging around. I have a Mach3 license but am failing to find the email with the license number (the machine that hosted it suffered from terminal disk disaster) so may have to ask Artsoft for a copy.
Mike
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Mike
"I have decided to go with the parallel BoB and spindle board and LinuxCNC"
If you go with 2 PP boards in a PC you would also be able to change the two pots (feed rate & spindle speed) to encoder pots and have them control the sliders on the gui in linuxcnc.
I have done this but using a mesa 7i92 (if I was doing it again i would use a 7I96). These get rid of the PP cards so are connected to the pc via cat5
Good luck with the build...Clive
The more you know, The better you know, How little you know
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