On 02/21/2015 03:42 PM, Brent Loschen wrote: > Greetings everyone! New guy here. I've been following the group for > several weeks and feel it's time for an intro and to get some > suggestions for a small project I'm working on.
Welcome to the world of LinuxCNC. > First, my motivation for looking into LinuxCNC. I own an older > Bridgeport R2E4 CNC mill (Boss 9 with DC servo motors) My HNC lathe has brushed DC servo motors. If your Bridgeport were in my shop, I would probably use the same setup as the HNC. That being keep the motors and motor power supply, replace the old drivers with Pico System PWM input drivers, add a hardware signal generator such as a Mesa 5i25 or Pico PWM board, add a Pico or Mesa resolver converter or preferably make or buy high resolution quadrature encoders to the ball screws. But that's just me. http://www.wallacecompany.com/cnc_lathe/HNC/ > To start that journey I would like to convert a Shapeoko type desktop > mill, from TinyG, to a real CNC control in order to become familiar with > the CNC software. If the new machine were primarily for learning to convert your Bridgeport and you aren't using it more than a couple days a month to make money, then I would go ahead and convert the Bridgeport. You can do a fair amount work without disabling your mill by building your PC controller and swapping cables from your old controller for testing. For learning, I tend to use old parts that I can get dirt cheap or free. Such as, for a small NEMA23 class mill, I have some discarded DC RV water pumps that leaked. So far, I have cleaned them up, replaced the bearings and I can either rebuild the pump sections or use the motors for a mill. For a small mill, I would probably get some US Digital sensors and disks to make encoders (although USD parts aren't cheap anymore). The motor driver is more of a problem. There may be some DC brushed drivers available from robot vendors, but these tend to be lower voltage. Either that or build you own. For the spindle, small used VFDs and three phase motors can be found on eBay. A parallel port could be used for the signal generation, but it would be easier to go with a 5i25 or similar. This setup would be just like your Bridgeport, just smaller. -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
