Hi Dan,
I bought the
Cubase 64M, the cabling pack and the CB290. Think I may have bought a serial cable from them too for programming the chip. Then the keypad later and an interface board. They have relay boards as well, but my up front planning on the whole project had me thinking otherwise on the relays. I planned on putting the relays in the control cabinet and that's where they are today. They run 110v ac accessories like the lights, air and coolant, and I didn't want to be sending ac currents from one box to the other if it wasn't absolutely necessary.
Yep, I looked at them, but they just didn't fit my needs. I tried hard to make the case for some of them, but in the end I couldn't. I'm a stick to my guns sort of guy and once my mind is made up, I'll try real hard to pull things off. I wanted the multi position switches of feed, spindle control and rapid feed rate control. And toggle switches for some functions. The toggle switches didn't turn out as I had envisioned them working though the modbus. They send the signal, then that's done with. So if the switch is left in the on state, turning them off does nothing. They have to be triggered again to cancel the function. But most of the switches in that case are momentary and have an led to show the status of the function.
The programming of the modbus at first seems daunting. I'm a retired cam guy and cnc programmer with many years experience. But not a ladder logic or basic programmer. So I wasn't real sure of things. But what I was thinking that with Mach brains, all I needed was to have the various brains sit there waiting for a pin on the modbus to go high or go low and respond in kind. And that's exactly how it worked out. A switch drives the state of a pin, Mach brains respond and maybe lights an led back through the modbus along with starting some action in Mach. The E-Stop, light switch and coolant switches all go direct to the control cabinet, not through the modbus.
I'm not sure I know what the difference is between TCP and Serial modbus. I set my connection up as Serial as shown in the Cubloc and Mach manuals. The biggest problem I had was with an undocumented require dstatement in the Cubloc file for that particular base and chip combo. And it seemed at the time I was the only guy trying to use the combo with Mach. So the comments by the guys I was asking was basically "what's your problem?" Went round and round with Comfile trying to get the board to talk to Mach. Then I found a statement by a prior employee of Comfile to an end user in their defunct forum. Added that in and it was talking to Mach. Then off to finish the Mach brains.
I'm happy with the whole setup and love the hard switches to control Mach. I wished I had done it long before I finally got around to doing it.
Bob