G-Rex G100 replacing existing control board?

[NXTwoThou]

For the past few years, the company I work for has sold Isel CPM2018 CNC that have been outfitted with probes, custom work areas, and custom software to do work for a particular industry.

Its worked out quite well. Our only big issue we've ever run into is that the control/pws boards don't seem to last very long. One of our customers was a long time user of one of our competitors that used the same CNC model and we where floored to learn that in the three years or so they had our competitor, they'd needed replacement control boards three times. So, slowly, as time has gone on, we too are running into this rather expensive($1.2K) problem. It seems no amount of filters or care stops them from eventually dying out.

Anyway, we've recently come up with plans on building another new product for the industry and we have a decent sized stock of these CPM2018 machines but we'll need 5 axis and the control board included with the CPM2018 only handles 4. After some web searches, I came across the G-Rex G100 and am highly curious at killing two birds with one stone(taking care of our crappy control/pws's and adding additional axises).

Am I right in assuming that if I get a G-Rex G100, attach a sufficent power supply, and wire up to my steppers(Nanotec ST5818M3008 3A 2.1V), I'd just have to recode my software from the commands it used for the CPM machine to the ones the G-Rex uses?(from the pdf online, they are remarkably close)

How do things like limit switches/homing work with the G100? Would I need to handle those in software?(constantly checking inputs?)

[turmite]

NXTwoThou

If your need is not immediate you might want to check out the Artsoft Mach4 that is dedicated to the G-rex. Not knowing your needs as far as control goes this might be the easiest solution to your problem,...........and no re-writing!

Mach4/G-Rex will be an inexpensive option for lots of oem's shortly or not so shortly! Here's a link http://www.machsupport.com/

Mike

[NXTwoThou]

Mach4, from what I can tell from the webpage, is more "make me this pattern"(and has a zillion ways of getting those patterns and advanced aloghrithms to decide the best way of making the final product).

For what we're doing, there's no CAD file, no g-code file, nothing like that. With our software, you put a standard sized workpiece in the holder, the software moves the cnc machine and uses a touch probe to determine center positions for the probe/workpiece, drills out portions of the workpiece to determine the center position of the drill. It stores these calibration values for later calculations. When a user wants to create a job, our software requests information from other pieces of software used in the business to determine basic information about the workpiece for displaying it on the screen, then the user decides what they want applied from a list of about 30,000 possible patterns or creates new ones. Then when a new workpiece is put in, goes to an offset from the center of the workpiece, uses probing to determine the exact edge location, then runs up the side of the workpiece and determines thickness. It then rotates the workpiece and applies those user selected patterns into the positions they requested and alerts the user when done. While its working on the first workpiece, they can start readying the next job, or switch over to one of the other cnc machines as you can run up to 4 at the same time on the same computer. Its highly tailored to this specific industry and real-time controls the cnc machine.

[turmite]

Since you have the software that is industry specific and doesn't look like you need a controller like Mach, I would suggest you contact Mariss at Gecko directly. You will not find a more helpful gentleman anywhere. He is the owner and will take the time to talk to you.

Mike