[vangalvin]

I have been looking at ways to build a single axis machine, actually it consists of 1 stepper, one Solenoid and a kind of encoder to count the manual Y axis. initially I was going to use an ardiuino and alter the reprap code to do what i wanted but have been looking instead of using a laptop with Mach3 as it has more flexability.

I have been looking at motion controllers but they price once landed for a single axis seems to be a little higher than what the project warrants so I was considering just using an arduino to controll the single axis via modbus and possibly the other functions. I have read and reread many posts about people wanting to use an Arduino as a USB to Paralell interface and so far have not seen any great success mostly due to the fact that the loading and having the arduino handle the processors required would end up making it really slow.

I then wondered why no one was looking at using the Modbus in such a way that one Arduino Nano conneced to a USB port would controll one Stepper, etc.. etc. Nano's are real cheap these days and my limited knoledge of the Modbus looks like you could assign each Nano with an address and send commands to it letting it do a single job like fire the pulses to the controller.

inputs would be a heck of a lot easier to handle from a single Arduino.

I would welcome any thoughts on the idea and suggestions as to any alternatives.

[H500]

Use a tb6600 instead of the 6560. Most 6560 boards are garbage.

Why do you need mach3 for 1 axis?. An arduino nano running GRBL will be able to coordinate up to 3 axes over the usb or serial port, depending on which version you get.

[vangalvin]

I already have 2 of the 6560 boards as well as some smoothsteppers so would like to use what I have for this project. I have been looking at GRBL and it looks great, the reason for using Mach3 was that i have written a routine for it that handles the M code for the input (manual Y) however i guess there wold be no reason I cant add this to the Arduino instead and possibly stick it on an interupt rather than just switch the port.

The i can just send the gcode to the unit, makes it nice and simple