Hello all,

I teach engineering at Herbert Hoover High School in Elkview, WV. I work collaboratively with the shop teacher at our school and he has a TechnoCNC router table, unsure of a model number, but it is a three axis machine and has a 5' X 10' bed on it. He purchased the machine used and we've had nothing but issues with it. When it is running, the machine does a great job, but we've had constant issues with it burning up control cards for the Z-axis. On it's most recent journey back to TechnoCNC they suggested swapping the Z-axis card into the, currently empty, A-axis slot and that may fix the issue. Ultimately we have tired of this thing being out of commission constantly and costing us greatly every time we burn up a card after less than 10 hours of use.

I apologize for the lengthy prelude, but my real question and reason for posting, is we would like to try our hand at making a new control box for the machine. If possible, I'd like to include my engineering students in on the process as I think it would be a worthwhile adventure for them to see how a problem like this is tackled in the "real-world" so to speak.

The machine uses 90V, 5.1A DC servos with encoders. A lot of the machines I've seen plans for online use a Gecko G540 but it also looks like those use stepper motors rather than servos with encoders. I'm new to this arena so I guess my first question would be if someone could suggest a starting point and maybe I can go from there.

Thanks in advance and I look forward to your suggestions,

Adam