Hi,

I got my first lathe recently, within a month I started thinking about adding steppers to it.

I watched a youtube where the guy wrote a bunch of Arduino code to drive steppers with encoders and he put the steppers on the leadscrew and cross-slide and replaced those handwheels with encoders. Also I saw the electronic leadscrew project, so an encoder on the spindle linked to a microcontroller that syncs with a leadscrew motor to cut threads.

Has anyone seen or adapted software that combines those functions, I'm familiar with LinuxCNC but I don't want "full-fat" CNC, having to "home" and all that jazz, just a kind of pimped up set of power feeds.

Like the system can create threads and tapers mostly on its own and also run multiple passes of common operations like parting, facing and turning.

Is there something like this out there?

Thanks for looking.

Cheers
Richard