I would like to know if it is possible to run multiple 3018 CNC's (USB interface controller boards) off the one PC at the same time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
In theory you should be able to but the control software would have to allow you to run multiple independent copies of it, each copy assigned to the connected USB port. You would need to be very careful to select the correct instance for the target machine when you do anything, it would be very (too?) easy to make mistakes.
Thank you for your reply. I kind of had a clue it could work like that and that it could get a bit confusing. I was thinking of trying it with something easy like Easle to see if it works but was not quite sure how much computing power and USB speeds I would need. My aim is to eventually have 4 of these CNC's running of the one PC.
Also wondering if the gcode is sent and stored on the controller board or is it fed through the USB as it goes along.
I have a Bangood 3018. I got it running OK, but the 24vdc power supply is defective and trips out when I run the spindle, I bought a 15 amp one on amazon for $18..The y axis stepper motor had .012" of end play, so I got one on amazon for $10.I got the ER11 collet kit from Banggood for $9.
The issue I am having now is with the GRBL 0.8.1 GCODE Sender. The visualization party of it does not work on Windows 10 only Windows 7. Are you running Windows 10? Does the visualization work?
Hi. I recently got one of these machines and I decided to run it from a Raspberry PI rather than the external controller. I think this gives me enough info be able to answer your unanswered questions. You don't need a huge amount of power from the PC to be able to get the G-code to the CNC, the USB port is actually being used as a Serial Port running at either 9600bps or 115Kbps, depending on your settings. 115K is the default. So any PC should be able to handle that. The real question is about the rest of the resources that the software would need, if it's a simple sender then you don't need much at all. If it does lots of fancy graphics stuff, that's a different story.
As for the g-code, it is send to the CNC as it goes along, there looks to be some protocol for that (I'd look deeply into GRBL if I wanted the full details) but from the surface it seems to send a few commands then wait for the first to finish before sending the next, The whole file is not sent in one go though. So if you are sending to 4 machines at one time, you'll have to make sure that there's no threading issues.
3018 CNC
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