On 21 February 2015 at 23:42, Brent Loschen <brent.losc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My question for the group is, what hardware would you > all recommend for this task? I've looked at some of the ~$150 Chinese, > 3 axis, PLC/control/stepper drive combos available on Ebay, > I think that those are a good choice for a "practice" machine. A cheap way to get started and find out what you really want. I probably wouldn't convert a Bridgeport with steppers anyway, as they are right on the edge of where steppers are usable. (Yes, I know that the original control is stepper) > One final consideration is whether to use a > parallel port solution, or if there are USB or network controls > available in a wallet friendly price range? > USB is right out, the USB spec allows latency of milliseconds, it can never be used for real-time control, so the solutions that do use USB run the motion-controller in the box at the end of the USB cable. There are a couple of Ethernet controlled boards available for LinuxCNC, but they are not properly mainstream yet. There are several options for PCI cards, and a couple of alternatives that use the p-port as a data bus to an FPGA which is hugely more powerful than bit-banging the parport. So, for your "practice" conversion I would say to go with an eBay TB6560 board and the parport. You might want to see the board as a "sunk cost" that will be replaced later when you are in a better position to specify hardware. That was the approach I took, and I don't regret it. I am still using some of the motors from the eBay kit, but the controller board was replaced by separate Leadshine-style black-box drives and the parport bit-banging was replaced by a parport communicating with a Mesa 7i43. Then the next machine was all 750W brushless servos with resolvers and a lot more money spent. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=190641631&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
