Milled a few PCB's today, the on/off control from Mach3 works great after getting the settings done.
All you have to do is go to ports/pins, spindle control, uncheck the box labeled Disable Spindle Relays, then put in the output you want to use in BOTH boxes. Now note this is not the pin number but the output number that you assign to the pin. I used 1 in both boxes just to keep everything organized in my notes, click apply, then you go to the output signals tab, find Output #1 or which one you assigned and set it for the port your using, in my case 1, and the pin you want assigned, in the case of this controller you need pin 1.
Now again apply and ok and then go to the diagnostics screen, click spindle on/off and you should see the Output #1 light up and your spindle should run. Also on the Spindle Control tab in ports and pins you should set the spinup delay under General Parameters. I set all four to 5 seconds, just to give the spindle some time to come up to full speed before the program advances into the material and also a bit of spin down time before it would happen to move after an M5 command in the GCode.
Works perfectly!!
Now i can open my GCode hit cycle start and it spins up, makes the cuts, spins down, and i generally add some GCode to move the spindle out of the way after the end of the cut, jogs to the top left corner of the table out of the way to cleanup and remove the piece i just made, etc. Now i am VERY happy with my setup!
I might have to take the Spindle Control Board back out and finish tracing it out for the PWM control. Other versions of this controller have a switch on the back to set either manual or software control of the spindle speed, but this board doesn't have any additional switch inputs for that, so i am guessing that something has to be done with the trimpot connection. The main reason i am thinking so is that the connector the trimpot plugs onto is just a set of header pins like you would put a PCB jumper on, otherwise i don't see why they didnt put a JST-XH socket there instead, that leads me to believe that you have to put a jumper on it to bypass the manual speed control.
More to come!