Sable 2015 Electronics?

[R_Frank]

Long story short years ago a client gave me a Sable 2015, new in box, it sat and collected dust for years in the garage, then I moved and it spent many more years in storage collecting dust, never seeing the light of day, so here I am a CNC newbie that finally would like to get the thing working as my first CNC machine.

It came to me with no electronics or spindle (or if it did they are long lost) so I'm here to get some input on what others might recommend for electronics and a small spindle as well as possible software suggestions to do at least some basic things with it? It does have the steppers installed.

Keep in mind I'm a total newbie so the simpler the better, especially when it comes to configuring the controller and any software.

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[blinkenlight]

There's no end to how much one can spend on "better" drivers and spindles, but I'd prefer to just list the most budget-friendly option I do not consider to be a waste of money. To be very clear, this is not "great" kit, nor even "good" kit - it is "quite decent enough" kit (for modest DIY purposes - including some PCB milling).

First, you need something to drive the axis motors with - I'd say the simplest option here is a GRBL-based controller board with built-in drivers (such as [1]). This means you won't be using Mach3/4 (or LinuxCNC) to control your machine, but a "controller/streamer GUI" of your choice (of which are MANY), such as [2] or [3] which are specialized front-ends to GRBL (which is the name of the firmware running inside the microcontroller on the board). You could of course just buy discrete drivers for the axes, hook them up to parallel port breakout board, then plug that one into an LPT port (if you can still find a PC that has one) and go on using MACH or LinuxCNC anyway - but frankly I'm using GRBL myself with my small desktop CNC and I never felt limited by not using a "proper" software like those others. Btw, GRBL uses USB to connect. Yes, it's technically using a friggin' age-old Arduino Uno to control the CNC and yes, it's absolutely far more qualified to do it properly than ANY software on a PC trying to pretend having a predictable latency.

Second, you'll need a spindle. Again the range is staggering, and often so is the price. I'd say that something like [4] would be decent (it's similar to mine), with the caveat the I for one would stay well away from spindles like [5] even if they're cheaper - to be clear, [4] is by no means great, but at least someone remembered mentioning a runout spec concerning it; whether or not it's true, they don't bother doing that at all for [5] because it's totally pointless and everyone knows it. Since you probably don't have the electronics for the spindle either, you might want to look for one that comes directly with it - Ultimately, it's just a power supply for the spindle motor, it's not even particularly important to have a speed control on it. These small spindles have exactly one useful speed, and yes it's called "just floor it"; you can't go past 10K RPM anyway, and there's no point going below - this is not the sort of metalworking machine that would have a use for low RPMs, especially with the low-end torque it doesn't have...

Good luck!

PLEASE NOTE that none of the links I referred to should be considered to be endorsed by me, or "buy EXACTLY this" advice. They're only examples of what to look for - these things are being sold EVERYWHERE from Amazon to Ebay to Aliexpress to... you get the idea. Search around and pick something that looks right to YOU. If questions arise once you find something you like, feel free to ask.

[1] - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33032361894.html
[2] - https://winder.github.io/ugs_website/
[3] - https://github.com/Denvi/Candle
[4] - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32669185018.html
[5] - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32835028452.html

[R_Frank]

Thanks for the input, pretty much what I had found out on my own over the last few days, but wanted some confirmation as I'm entirely out of the loop.

I do have faint memories from way back when. when I was given the machine that the controllers of the day were primarily parallel port driven and that is one of the reasons I never set it up in the first place as even at that time I didn't have a PC with a parallel port and I was told at the time that the add on parallel ports didn't always work the best, thus tossed on the shelf and forgotten. Looks like the GRBL based controllers are the way to go for a hobbyist that just wants to get something up and running.