[Dingo745]

G'day,
It's been a long time since I dabbled in CNC routers when I built a small 900X900 steel&ally router and back then Rodm1954 was the Go To bloke for advice and Greolt was pretty clued up as well.
Anyhow fast forward to today and I'm doing a new CNC router build on a pensioners budget and I have already ordered a linear rail , ballscrews, bearing supports and coupler kit that will give me an
1100 X700X300 work area rougly. The rails are SBR 20's and the ballscrews are all RM 16005's and my main problem now is deciding what steppers will be best suited to what I have so far for general wood, plastic
and occasion aluminium work. I'm tempted to go with a generic Ebay 3axis kit, but I'm also leaning towards a G540 Gecko kit from Hormann's but what motors I have no idea even after trying to fathom out a excel calculator that was dutch to me.
So any advice would be appreciated.
The rest of my build will be a Smoothstepper USB or Ethernet and Chinese water cooled spindle and VFD which will all be worlds away from my old $20 Ozito Router and Parallel Point BOB seeing I don't own a modern computer with a parallel port but all three of my computers all have USB and ethernet ports.
Also I'm located in S.A, Wirrina Cove and previously in Tassie, so it would interesting to see how many members here live in the sate of confusion, S.A.

Thanks,
Dingo

[awerby]

Go with Peter Homann's G540; I'm sure he can suggest some motors to go with it you can obtain over there. Those Ebay kits are total junk, we get lots of people here who've bought them and wonder why they can't get them to work.

[pippin88]

I'm a fan of Leadshine digital drivers, available quite economically on Aliexpress. If you want I can dig up a couple of sellers that I've dealt with.

[Dingo745]

I'm a fan of Leadshine digital drivers, available quite economically on Aliexpress. If you want I can dig up a couple of sellers that I've dealt with.

It can't hurt to have a look, but I have mixed success with generic Chinese stepper drivers.
I like the compact simplicity of the Gecko 540, it's just the price that hurts now the dollar is rooted

Thanks.

[pippin88]

Leadshine are not generic drivers. You can buy them (for a premium) in Australia from Ocean Controls

[RCaffin]

You get what you pay for ... but if you pay too little what you get is often grief. (Chinese stuff somehow comes to mind.)

Peter Homann is a good bloke, quite reliable. Ask him for suggestions.

Cheers

[speed_racer]

G'day,
It's been a long time since I dabbled in CNC routers when I built a small 900X900 steel&ally router and back then Rodm1954 was the Go To bloke for advice and Greolt was pretty clued up as well.
Anyhow fast forward to today and I'm doing a new CNC router build on a pensioners budget and I have already ordered a linear rail , ballscrews, bearing supports and coupler kit that will give me an
1100 X700X300 work area rougly. The rails are SBR 20's and the ballscrews are all RM 16005's and my main problem now is deciding what steppers will be best suited to what I have so far for general wood, plastic
and occasion aluminium work. I'm tempted to go with a generic Ebay 3axis kit, but I'm also leaning towards a G540 Gecko kit from Hormann's but what motors I have no idea even after trying to fathom out a excel calculator that was dutch to me.
So any advice would be appreciated.
The rest of my build will be a Smoothstepper USB or Ethernet and Chinese water cooled spindle and VFD which will all be worlds away from my old $20 Ozito Router and Parallel Point BOB seeing I don't own a modern computer with a parallel port but all three of my computers all have USB and ethernet ports.
Also I'm located in S.A, Wirrina Cove and previously in Tassie, so it would interesting to see how many members here live in the sate of confusion, S.A.

Thanks,
Dingo

Hey Mate,

I have also been doing my research on these little buggers as well. I have found there are 2 main stepper motor manufacturers on ebay longsmotor and wantaimotor.. For my application (a CNC Mill) Im going for Nema34's 1600oz-in. I was on the market for a prebuilt CNC 6040 router and it failed through due to the cost of customs, port shipping fee's etc.. but they were nice so I was asking questions about their router stepper motors afterwards and they use Nema24's for XY and Nema34's for the Z axis.

If you look on ebay, you can find even the same supplier will have the Stepper motors at different prices. For Eg: 3axis Nema34 kit with drivers and breakout board for $395 + 195 shipping.. Then the same kit offered in the UK for $499AUD with free postage.

Also with regards to the parallel port, if you have ballscrews with zero backlash, you could run a grblshield on arduino (hardware worth about $15) with chillipeppr (software free www.chillipeppr.com) which then you can control using USB.

Good luck!!

[RCaffin]

Gecko 540 would be vastly superior to a lot of the Chinese stuff.
Smooth Stepper, yes, but definitely go for the Ethernet version. Some have had a lot of strife with noise on the USB link.
I like the Homann MB-02 BoBs.

Cheers
Roger

[speed_racer]

the gecko drive and homann referred to only offer parallel port. Why is it that they still use the legacy ports instead of USB or ethernet?

Im wondering if I can get arduino grbl working with LinuxCNC on a raspberry Pi then use some remote software like vnc etc.. to monitor and control it via wifi/eth.

[RCaffin]

Basically, you have misunderstood what's going on.

The default standard, at least in the Mach world, is the parallel port connector. But we don't have these on the PC any more. The Ethernet SS offers the equivalent of THREE 'parallel port' connections on the output side. The USB SS offers two parallel ports.

So: PC - ethernet cable - ESS - psuedo DB25 ribbon cable - BoB (eg MB-02) - wires to the geckos etc etc.
Or the ribbon cable can go into the G540 if you are running steppers.

Actually, the ribbon cables are 26 wire ones, and the 26th wire can be +5 V.

Cheers
Roger

[speed_racer]

Basically, you have misunderstood what's going on.

The default standard, at least in the Mach world, is the parallel port connector. But we don't have these on the PC any more. The Ethernet SS offers the equivalent of THREE 'parallel port' connections on the output side. The USB SS offers two parallel ports.

So: PC - ethernet cable - ESS - psuedo DB25 ribbon cable - BoB (eg MB-02) - wires to the geckos etc etc.
Or the ribbon cable can go into the G540 if you are running steppers.

Actually, the ribbon cables are 26 wire ones, and the 26th wire can be +5 V.

Cheers
Roger

Thanks mate. However the standard with mach4 is they are moving away from parallel ports and moving towards USB/Eth. Generally I have found parallel/rs232 serial to usb converters cause more issues than they do advantages. For eg, plotters such as the chinese ones and roland have another interface to convert usb to parallel or rs232 depending on the model. so you actually need 2 sets of drivers in order to control the board. Not all of these drivers are available for todays standard operating systems (win8 or ubuntu etc..) therefore you need to run legacy operating systems to suit the drivers. Been there, done that before.

For me, I can figure it out, for the average user though.. its painful (its even painful enough getting unsigned drivers installed on win8 for arduino controllers for eg.

it also limits the types of hardware you can use.. like I'm sure many of us have old laptops kicking around but if they are not old enough (7+ years) then they wont have a parallel port. It seems silly why hardware providers don't move towards building their hardware on the later platform architecture rather than legacy interfaces.

[RCaffin]

I think you are confusing the old physical PP port itself as found on the old PCs with the PP interface definition. Yes, PCs no longer have physical PP sockets on the back of the case - the Mostek chip used for that may be out of production these days. But the interface DEFINITION and PINOUT lives on, for Mach and for a number of other users.

There is a huge industry centered around the pinout of the PP interface, with many suppliers making compatible cards. For Mach4 to abandon that would be commercial suicide. They want everyone who is currently running Mach3 through these PP interfaces (even if reached via the ethernet) to upgrade to Mach4. They have to use that interface definition to be compatible with the world.

That means they have not abandoned the concept of the parallel port: they just don't expect to drive the pins directly. Mach4 now ASSUMES you will use an external engine which goes between the ethernet interface and the PP pins. This is a wonderful idea, as it removes the Real-Time requirements which used to give Mach3 so much trouble.

So these days we go through the ethernet (or the USB) to an external engine to a bank of these connectors, and we still use the original pinout.

Now, a point here about USB vs ethernet. If you want to go through the USB port, then you may need a special driver. Unfortunately the common 3rd-party USB driver has bugs in it it, and is very poor at error-recovery. To make matters worse, the voltage levels for USB are fairly low. It was NEVER meant for interfacing to high-power industrial gear. Noise intrudes!

For some of us, the USB link would fail once every day. On the other hand, the ethernet is transformer-isolated, runs at a higher signal level, and is designed to handle full error-recovery. It guarrantees packet delivery. So many of us have switched from USB to ethernet, and have never had any more problems. That includes me.

Yes, there are non-Mach systems which use the USB. My understanding is that they use their own drivers - for which they have error-recovery in the driver stack. OK.

Cheers
Roger