Tom,
Thanks for your input. Its great to be getting advise from a CNC Guru. I hope to do a deal with you in the future on a plasma set up if you will ship to Ireland?
The main reason I want to build a small prototype is to learn. I am worried about spending 5000Euro on building a machine and making a mess of it. At the moment I cant even drive a stepper motor using Mach3 let alone try and control 3 axes and a tool. Id really like to gain some experience in simply controlling motors to start with. One step at a time and all that (no pun intended)
On the point of the small prototype I already have a Y axis..Straight out of a printer. I reckon I can make the X axis in one day out of scrap steel lying around. The way I learn is by reading something and then manually doing it. Its usually during the manual part that things start to click in my head. The prototype will not be extremely precise. I am just looking to move an x and y axis and try and get it to draw basic shapes to start. I have been reading the forum for about 6 months now and am just starting to get brave enough to try a table for myself. The other point is that I can work on this in my house rather than my cold workshop because it is so small.
With regard to connecting my current setup as discussed previously:
If I connect a 24V power supply to the stepper control board,
Connect the direction signal from the parallel port (Mach3) to the direction signal on the stepper control board
Connect the Step signal from the parallel port(Mach3) to the clock input on the stepper control board
Set the full step/half step input and the preset to 0. So I should be in half step mode .
Do I need to connect the ground of the parallel port to anywhere?
Do the signals from Mach3 need to be amplified in any way?
Thanks again for your help.
Ronan..  |