Edit: Fixed the SmoothieWare link below.
I have been itching to upgrade my CNC's Porter Cable 690 router but had no real budget to do it. I came across a Porter Cable 7518 3.25 HP variable speed "production" router on eBay for $170 and could not resist. This thing is a freaking beast compared to the PC 690 router (1.75 HP) (see attached comparison photo). I got the router mounted on my machine but have not done any jobs yet. I need to put the wiring harness back together.
While cutting the new mounting parts for the router on my existing set up I got completely fed up with my motion electronics. I've been using a horrible Chinese "Blue Board" driver board attached to a Linux system running LinuxCNC. The driver board has great Toshiba driver chips but every other facet of this board is poorly designed. The electronic signalling from the controlling PC to the driver chips is all screwed up and caused "lost steps" all over the place. There are many great write-ups on how to modify the driver board to overcome most of the pain. I did all these upgrades (my degree is in Electrical Engineering) and got it mostly working. Another issue I kept running up against was "real time" errors in LinuxCNC. My PC is a dual core Athlon system from 2005. It has 2 GB RAM which showed to be completely up to the task watching the system monitors. I even isolated one of the CPU cores so that the low-level motion program would not compete for CPU resources. Nothing completely solved the problem. It worked OK but never gave me complete confidence.
That said, today is a new day. I just got my SmoothieBoard http://smoothieware.org yesterday. This is a fully standalone small computer that handles all motion planning and stepper motor driving that sells for between $125 - $175. You simply send a G-Code file to the board via copying over USB to it's on-board flash memory or through an embedded webserver through the board's Ethernet port. Then you send a "play" command over USB or Ethernet and the SmoothieBoard does it all. The SmoothieBoard processor has a drive rate of at least 6x of my old setup and is supposed to work flawlessly.
I hope to get time over the next week to get the SmoothieBoard wired and configured. I will update this thread with video once I get to that point.
Pardon the rotated images.
Ken
I have been itching to upgrade my CNC's Porter Cable 690 router but had no real budget to do it. I came across a Porter Cable 7518 3.25 HP variable speed "production" router on eBay for $170 and could not resist. This thing is a freaking beast compared to the PC 690 router (1.75 HP) (see attached comparison photo). I got the router mounted on my machine but have not done any jobs yet. I need to put the wiring harness back together.
While cutting the new mounting parts for the router on my existing set up I got completely fed up with my motion electronics. I've been using a horrible Chinese "Blue Board" driver board attached to a Linux system running LinuxCNC. The driver board has great Toshiba driver chips but every other facet of this board is poorly designed. The electronic signalling from the controlling PC to the driver chips is all screwed up and caused "lost steps" all over the place. There are many great write-ups on how to modify the driver board to overcome most of the pain. I did all these upgrades (my degree is in Electrical Engineering) and got it mostly working. Another issue I kept running up against was "real time" errors in LinuxCNC. My PC is a dual core Athlon system from 2005. It has 2 GB RAM which showed to be completely up to the task watching the system monitors. I even isolated one of the CPU cores so that the low-level motion program would not compete for CPU resources. Nothing completely solved the problem. It worked OK but never gave me complete confidence.
That said, today is a new day. I just got my SmoothieBoard http://smoothieware.org yesterday. This is a fully standalone small computer that handles all motion planning and stepper motor driving that sells for between $125 - $175. You simply send a G-Code file to the board via copying over USB to it's on-board flash memory or through an embedded webserver through the board's Ethernet port. Then you send a "play" command over USB or Ethernet and the SmoothieBoard does it all. The SmoothieBoard processor has a drive rate of at least 6x of my old setup and is supposed to work flawlessly.
I hope to get time over the next week to get the SmoothieBoard wired and configured. I will update this thread with video once I get to that point.
Pardon the rotated images.
Ken
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