Hi,

I have a HAAS mill (TM1) - it doesn't have a 4th axis card, or equipment - but I want one - not even full 4th, just indexing would be an interesting start.

So I was thinking about purchasing one but the cost of a full HAAS setup will be nearly the cost of my mill all over again, which I can't justify at the moment even if it would become a full 4th which may be cool - so then I got hunting around and saw you can buy industrial rotary setups and stand alone HAAS external drives which take an output signal from the mill controller to execute a move (rotation) then signal the mill to carry on running the g code in the main programme of the mill controller. Unfortunately the costs of getting one of these setups to the UK is really high even for 2nd hand (as they are nearly all US based and HEAVY!)...so I started to consider a cheaper investment to dip my toe before investing more heavily - and came across a cheap 4th axis on ebay made in China... could be a goer to test the concept at least.... but then I got stuck when it came to driving the thing...

I'd really like to use an output signal from the main mill HAAS controller (MFIN cable?) to signal the chinese 4th axis rotary table to do a position change - this would probably need hand coding in the first instance in terms of degree of rotation, and would mostly be 180 flips and other simple indexing at this stage.

What I need to figure out, is if Mach 3 or some other generic controller software can take on these duties i.e.

1) MFIN signal from mill to standalone controller to advance rotary table
2) advance rotary table preset degrees
3) MFIN signal from standalone controller to main mill controller to confirm g code can carry on


So folks - I hope I haven't asked this question in the wrong forum - but I;d welcome your views/comments/advice please

THANKS!

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