[CaspianCmonster]

Hi everyone, I am designing a small CNC add on for my Schaublin 102 lathe. It will use the rear T slot with a 20mm profile rail and a modified cutoff cross slide for the mechanics, probably with ball screws and conventional steppers. That part I can figure out well enough.

There are so many options for electronics that I am a bit overwhelmed. This lathe is expensive and very accurate so I want to build something that is appropriate to the rest of the machine. The point of this project is primarily to add thread cutting to the lathe and get an introduction into CNC. My experience thus far is with a 3D printer and a masters degree on spindle balancing.

I have the original 3phase motor running with a VFD so I can interface with that for speed control but otherwise only need 2 axis and the spindle location.

As I plan on using LinuxCNC my choices might be a bit different than with Mach3 (no USB options) but there are still many
1. Mesa 5i52+7i76+stepper drivers and steppers
2. Gecko G540+steppers (perhaps with new PCI card to connect to the G540)
3. Cheap basic breakout board +stepper drivers + steppers
4. servos etc
5. something I have missed

I want a robust and reliable machine and would rather spend a bit more money to avoid gremlins and random problems with connections, noise etc. I am not concerned with high rate production etc so lower power steppers are probably ok. I would like to avoid having to have yet another special computer in the house to run this machine but that is probably not an option as don't currently have one that can accept a PCI card and that appears to be the best way to run a CNC. I have an old laptop with a printer port that I use for speaker design and measurement software that might be an option as well. perhaps (BeagleBone CNC: Machinekit BeagleBone Debian Images Released) is an option.

thanks

Luke

[doorknob]

As much as I am eager to be able to use a Beaglebone Black as my motion controller, it is still early in the development stage, and so I don't think that you can count on it being stable yet.

Lots of people are using the G540. I don't have experience with it, but apparently the Mesa route is also well-traveled, as is the generic breakout board with Chinese drivers.

I have no experience with servos, so can't say much about them, other than that they are often used on high-end machines, but will you really need that for your setup?