Originally Posted by
hive8
So i made my decision going to use the Keiling Digital Stepper Drivers 5060D... now its up to the software since there are two options LinuxCNC (former EMC2) or Mach3, i have to say Mach 3 has a huge community which helps a lot... But LinuxCNC is free and i would safe about $149 (Software) and $189 SmoothStepper... but how well does LinuxCNC work with steppers?
EMC can use the Parallel port to generate the pulses to driver the drivers, or you can use MESA boards which are FPGA which can do it as well. FPGA offload the main CPU of the work, so work really well for machines which aren't up to the task of generating the pulses. I'm using EMC and it works great with 5056's (non-digital) and just finished phase 1 conversion. Computer wise, I'm running a Dual Core 1.8Ghz Intel Atom Mini-ITX computer. As for support, their is large community support for EMC as well, just not as much on cnczone.com. They have a IRC channel on freenote.net #linuxcnc
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