[Noah]

Progress on doing a custom Grizzly G1005 CNC conversion is going well. I am going to be using Nema 34 servos of some kind. . I have access to quite a few AC brushless servos with controllers for cheap prices. These servos come from multi-million dollar pieces of optical test equipment and are superior to most any servos on ebay or anywhere else. Trouble is, all the controllers take standard analog servo inputs. I can't use Rutex or Gecko drivers since the servos are AC and brushless. Is there any cheap way to convert step direction signals from parallel ports to a standard analog servo input?

[HuFlungDung]

Noah,

Have you considered purchasing a motion control card on Ebay? While not cheap, there are often some offered at a considerable discount.

[azsigns]

Have a look at this:

http://www.rutex.com/pdf/R991h.pdf

Chris

[Noah]

I have considered a motion control card. I have not checked ebay fo them yet. I will do that tonight. That rutex driver azsigns pointed out could also be very useful. Thanks for the help.

[Noah]

Well I thought I knew what a motion control card was, but now I am not so sure. I checked ebay and am a bit confused. Can these interface with standard step and direction software? Most of them have RS232 port outputs which is what I would need for my controllers and motors, but I didn't know Mach 1, Turbocnc, or any of those output packages worked with them.

[Al_The_Man]

Your first post indicated you had access to Analog servo amps and motors, that was the reason I believe HU recommended a motion card, these do have step and direction outputs, but they also have analog outputs for the type of amps you indicated. they do not use a Serial port for servo control, they also have encoder feedback input options. The Galil series of cards are jumper selectable for Step or servo, wheras the Acroloop cards have to be ordered for step or servo.
There is a few vendors that sell software for Galil , Camsoft for one.
Acroloop have there own CNC software in either DOS or Win based versions.
There is a Camsoft forum here also.
If you look at the Galil cards on ebay, look at the PC based ones not the stand alone type.
Al