If you need more than 4 axis, as long as your software supports more axis and 2 parallel ports, you can use more than one board. TurboCNC will let you have 8 axis I believe. Stepper motor torque drops off rapidly as speed increases. To still maintain high torque at 900 rpm, you'll need to use a very high voltage. Probably at least 48V or more, depending on the motors you choose.
The Pico board, I believe, is not a driver board. It feeds the signals to driver boards such as Geckos.
The FET-4 is a unipolar board, not sure of the voltage it can handle.
The xylotex board can onlyreally use around 27v with high powered motors. I've got one with some 253 oz-in motors wired in series. My machine is not finished yet, so I can't give you any real performance info, but I don't think I'll be able to use much more than around 400-500 rpm, if even that. I intend to use 4 tpi acme screws to make up for the speed.
Gerry
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Gerry
Mach3 2010 Screenset
http://home.comcast.net/~cncwoodworker/2010.html
(Note: The opinions expressed in this post are my own and are not necessarily those of CNCzone and its management) |