Hi All,

I am just hoping to get some feedback from you guys, or your thoughts on a new product we will be releasing soon. We have developed a new fully customisable CNC controller system for our own retrofit jobs, but are now thinking of making it availailable for people doing their own builds or retrofits as it could really help make the job so much easier.

Just a little background to this, here at CNC Teknix we have been developing electronics for machine controls for over 10 years now, and have retrofitted a large number of different CNC machines. In this time we have learned that most retrofits need a bit of customisation somewhere to meet the customers requirements, so now to make things easier we have developed a controller that can be easily customised, both internally and externally, to give almost any functionality that is required.

The base of the new control board can connect up to 6 axes, either Stepper or Servo, it has connections to add full featured Control Panels or Hand Pendants, (all customisable), and has Opto isolated Inputs and Outputs and connections for various other devices. There are numerous other expansion boards that can also be added to this to extend its I/O and functions. It also has an Ethernet interface to the computer courtesy of an embedded Smoothstepper board.

But the real feature of this board is the on-board FPGA which can be factory programmed to provide any logic that is required, anything from re-mapping pins to adding PWM generators, slaving axes, toolchanger logic, servo engage logic, position counters etc. Since these are all software modules, and we have built up heaps of modules over the years, we can easily add modules as required, or write new ones if needed!

We have used this new control board on 3 different retrofits now and each one was so easy compared to our previous retrofits I realised it could be the answer for anyone who is not a Mach or Electronics guru to get the system they want without the headache! The aim is to supply a barebones control board, customised to suit and supplied with instructions, a connection diagram, the Mach xml and any relevent macros or brains to make it a complete package.

The only problem I have is how to best get a complete and accurate description of the machine and what features are required, so that I can put together what is needed to make it all work!

Any ideas, feedback or enquiries would be welcome.

Cheers

Pete

Similar Threads: