New Control System for TechnoCNC system

Hello all,

I teach engineering at Herbert Hoover High School in Elkview, WV. I work collaboratively with the shop teacher at our school and he has a TechnoCNC router table, unsure of a model number, but it is a three axis machine and has a 5' X 10' bed on it. He purchased the machine used and we've had nothing but issues with it. When it is running, the machine does a great job, but we've had constant issues with it burning up control cards for the Z-axis. On it's most recent journey back to TechnoCNC they suggested swapping the Z-axis card into the, currently empty, A-axis slot and that may fix the issue. Ultimately we have tired of this thing being out of commission constantly and costing us greatly every time we burn up a card after less than 10 hours of use.

I apologize for the lengthy prelude, but my real question and reason for posting, is we would like to try our hand at making a new control box for the machine. If possible, I'd like to include my engineering students in on the process as I think it would be a worthwhile adventure for them to see how a problem like this is tackled in the "real-world" so to speak.

The machine uses 90V, 5.1A DC servos with encoders. A lot of the machines I've seen plans for online use a Gecko G540 but it also looks like those use stepper motors rather than servos with encoders. I'm new to this arena so I guess my first question would be if someone could suggest a starting point and maybe I can go from there.

Thanks in advance and I look forward to your suggestions,

Adam

Gecko makes servo drives but they are only rated up to 80 VDC and they will handle up to 20 AMPS . G320X DIGITAL SERVO DRIVE is there servo drive. i have no experience with the servo drives from gecko but the stepper drives i have had zero issues with.

as far as controls go there are quite a few options out there these days. centroid acorn would be a good one to check out. centroid has been around for quite some time in the cnc control game and the acorn is the entry level controls for the DYI built controllers. they have a rather large online forum as well for more information. i have not used this control personally but it caught my attention and looks pretty straight forward.

Thanks so much for the response, I will definitely check out the Centroid Acorn system.