hello,

i have bridgeport series 1 milling & wants to retrofit it. shall we retain old stepper motors & go far drives & plc to make it pc based or go for rerofit kit . what would be the easy way with low price.
looking for ur favourable reply

thanks

AJIT

Easy and cheap is Gecko drives with the old steppers, if you want it faster with servos just ad $$$

cheapest way is to hook it up to a PC through a breakout that a guy on this forum sells, his name is Hillbilly.
Personally I went the Gecko route as the Bridgeport electronics are getting old and not very reliable, but obviously that is more expensive, cost me about £1500 including the mill. I used new steppers and luxuries like a touch screen and MPG.
Hood

hi, thanks for ur reply. can u just little clearly explain the way going gekos. i had no knowledge of control or drivers. please let me know which control i used with gekos & how?
thanks

hi, thanks for ur reply. can u just little clearly explain the way going gekos. i had no knowledge of control or drivers. please let me know which control i used with gekos & how?
thanks
Geckos are drivers, you need one of them for each stepper motor, you will also need a power supply to power the motors/geckos and although not a necessity it is highly recommended that an isolated breakout board is used to connect the geckos and limits etc to the parallel port of the computer. The compouter then has the software for controlling the motors/drives, I use Mach3 which can control up to 6 axis independantly at the same time.
You can have a look at the info on www.geckodrive.com the G202 is for steppers.
A working trial of Mach3 can be downloaded from http://www.machsupport.com/artsoft/index/index.htm you will also be able to download videos and manuals from the Mach site showing how to configure Mach etc
There are many breakout boards available, I use a PMDX 122 from www.PMDX.com but if you look on the links page on the Mach site you will see lots of others such as Campbell desighns, CNC4PC etc etc.


Hood

One of the guys out here (Jerry) drew up a excellent schematic for working with Gecko's and the cnc4pc c-10 breakout board. This takes all the guess work out of what your doing. Attached below.

thanks for ur mail, i did not understand more$$$. do i have to buy new steppers. are these steppers not of accuraccy or effeciency. can u explain that. so nice of u . thanks

thanks for ur mail, i did not understand more$$$. do i have to buy new steppers. are these steppers not of accuraccy or effeciency. can u explain that. so nice of u . thanks
I think what was meant was it will work fine with the steppers but if you want a really fast rapid movement then you will need servo motors rather than steppers and servos cost a lot of money.
Hood