Hello all,
I'm trying to filter the difference between a 'breakout board' and a 'motion control board'. If you go to CNC4PC, they sell a whole section for Breakout Boards, but then if you go to the Motion Control Board section, they also have what appear to be Breakout Boards listed under there.
I understand the breakout boards are just a port broken out into it's individual pins, with some isolation in-between. Is the Motion Control Board basically that, with a PC wrapped inside? Do they have provision for operator interface (the one's I'm seeing don't mention anything about it). How do they load gcode (again, no mention)?. I can't quite tell if it still needs a PC.
These questions popped up when looking into servos and drives. I'm familiar with steppers and how to implement them, but when trying to figure out servos I can't seem to determine what takes the place of the breakout board on a comparable stepper system. It seems that most generic servo drives can take a pulse and direction input, just like a stepper. Does this mean (assuming the voltages are the same) I can simply take out the stepper/drive and put in a servo/drive and that same pulse and direction should work just fine (probably after a little configuration of the drive itself)? Or does a servo drive require something more like what a motion control board provides?
Whenever I'm searching google for something like "CNC breakout board, servo drive" it pops up with hundreds of breakout boards and they all only mention steppers, not seeming to find anything about the servo equivalent.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the place of the breakout board on a servo drive? (assuming a PC control with something like Mach3, I know there are other options like motion control PLCs, and full blown CNCs like Fanuc).