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At work we are making a cutting tool; Of course we will get health and safty involved before we use any such tool!.
We want to control a ballscrew with a dc motor using a board where it does the following ;
1) one full cycle ; i.e forward and back
2) but it only does it once every 15 minutes
Do I require the breaker board on the picture; I code from PC then upload the coding into the chip?
And the code is stored permenant?
Can someone please help?
https://i.ibb.co/mDCqD85/axissmall.png
You are showing an axis that uses a stepper motor. To control a stepper motor you need a stepper driver like a TB6600 or DM542T or many others.
To controll the stepper driver, you need a CNC controller board. The one you show is probably a Mach3 controller board.
You can upload a CNC program to Mach3. For that you need a PC. Restarting the program every 15 minutes, requires a bit more programming. The code is not stored on the Mach3 board
A (simple no PC) solution would be to use a grbl controller and load the initialization code with the gcodes you need to run the stepper motion. Add some delays (dwell) to the gcode to wait the 15 minutes and finaly a reset command to start over again. The code is stored permanently on the Grbl controller board. I use this approach to run my small grinder that is controlled by an Arduino nano running grbl out of the box.
An alternative would be Grbl_ESP32. That can run complete gcode files out of the box by the press of a button.
what's difference in using Grbl_ESP32 method? more expensiver?
The Grbl_ESP32 version is capable of running a gcode file from sd card. That allows more gcodes and is easier to test and maintain.
Since you are a newbie, it is time to learn a bit about cnc control. Grbl has a very good WiKi and Youtube contains a lot of short video's about this subject. Depending on the complexity of how you want to move the axis there are other ways to do this. In the end, I am convinced that you will learn so much from using a CNC controller for this project, that you will benefit a lot for future projects.
https://github.com/gnea/grbl/wiki
https://github.com/bdring/Grbl_Esp32/wiki
Thank you; I will enjoy this learning.