For the past few years, the company I work for has sold Isel CPM2018 CNC that have been outfitted with probes, custom work areas, and custom software to do work for a particular industry.
Its worked out quite well. Our only big issue we've ever run into is that the control/pws boards don't seem to last very long. One of our customers was a long time user of one of our competitors that used the same CNC model and we where floored to learn that in the three years or so they had our competitor, they'd needed replacement control boards three times. So, slowly, as time has gone on, we too are running into this rather expensive($1.2K) problem. It seems no amount of filters or care stops them from eventually dying out.
Anyway, we've recently come up with plans on building another new product for the industry and we have a decent sized stock of these CPM2018 machines but we'll need 5 axis and the control board included with the CPM2018 only handles 4. After some web searches, I came across the G-Rex G100 and am highly curious at killing two birds with one stone(taking care of our crappy control/pws's and adding additional axises).
Am I right in assuming that if I get a G-Rex G100, attach a sufficent power supply, and wire up to my steppers(Nanotec ST5818M3008 3A 2.1V), I'd just have to recode my software from the commands it used for the CPM machine to the ones the G-Rex uses?(from the pdf online, they are remarkably close)
How do things like limit switches/homing work with the G100? Would I need to handle those in software?(constantly checking inputs?)