--- On Thu, 4/4/13, John Stewart <alex.stew...@crc.ca> wrote: > I'm looking for ideas here. > > A Unimat SL1000, MK1 landed on my desk last Saturday. It's > mine if I want it. Have been thinking of taking some of my > CNC parts kicking around home and using them, but I don't > think using a 5i25 + 7i76 + Nema 34 steppers is great. > > So, with a little lathe like this, if I go with NEMA 17 "3D > Printer" steppers (think Reprap or one of the Thingverse > machines), what would be the best, least expensive way of > driving these steppers from a LinuxCNC setup?
Even 17's would dwarf that Unimat. I'd try some motors from printers or old 5.25" full height floppy drives. I just happen to have a pair of Tandon single sided 5.25" drives I've been trying to give away for a while. ;) Had them on a TI-99/4A years ago before upgrading to double sided drives. The drive motors for spinning the disks might also be useful for micro CNC with encoders added. I think they have tachometers built in. Even cooler would be using the motor control boards from the drives. They do step and direction for the head steppers and on/off for the drive motors. 'Course they have rather poor resolution with only 40 normally accessible steps, though that's not a hard limit, there was software for increasing the number of tracks on disks for some computers. I wonder if it'd be possible to hack the control board (which is separate from and much smaller than the data read/write board) to work as a more general purpose one? Microstepping might be a bit much to add. There was a site that showed using the boards and motors from a pair of floppy drives to build a robot, but it vanished. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Minimize network downtime and maximize team effectiveness. Reduce network management and security costs.Learn how to hire the most talented Cisco Certified professionals. Visit the Employer Resources Portal http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/employer_resources/index.html _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
