Hi John, Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear in the first case. I may well be breaking new ground but, from what you have said, I'm sure that EMC can cope - its just a question of trying to work out how. What I have is a home-made benchtop milling machine which I use for making parts for watches and some pieces of jewellery. I started out with a simple 3-axis machine which is all stepper driven. Then I made a worm driven rotary axis which I hooked up as 'A' *http://tinyurl.com/5ccrk6*. However, a lot of the parts I make for the watches are mainly turned or threaded and so now I have made a little lathe attachment *http://tinyurl.com/672fpr . *For simplicity and because I don't yet really understand servos, I have also set this up with a stepper motor.
So, with this lathe, I think I now have the chance to use it in two ways - firstly as a pure lathe in which case I want to be able to run the lathe spindle stepper continuously through the 'A' axis driver board independently of the g-code driving the 'X' and 'Z' axes ( I am currently making a lathe tool holder to fit onto the Z-axis). This can be one specific machine configuration. As most of my work is on tiny parts - mostly of hardenable steel, a high revving spindle or great power is not necessary and the 1400rpm I mentioned was just the fastest I could get the stepper/spindle combination to run at with an independently driven board. Secondly, since the lathe is stepper driven, I would like to be able to use it as a normal rotary 'A' axis for such jobs as indexing a tiny gear or pinion for cutting, or for milling a square on a shaft etc. This again could be a separate machine set-up. Even in cases where - for instance making a winding stem for a watch - I would want to turn a rod to shape with various stepped diameters, mill a square on one end and cut a thread on the other, I would have to stop the machine to change tools and so, at that point, I could shut down EMC and restart it with another machine config. I think I understand what you are saying about leaving the normal rotary axis config alone and making a new one based on one of the lathe configs - that makes sense but in the reference you give http://www.linuxcnc.org/docview/html//config_emc2hal.html#r1_1_1 I don't seem to be able to understand where the stepper would get its pulses or direction feed from. maybe its just that I am not understanding the technical language used or perhaps I'm just being a bit dim........ I will try to have a bit of a play with things later when I get a minute but actually getting the stepper to run seems a bit fundamental and that seems to be the difficult part.... Thanks. -- Best wishes, Ian ____________ Ian W. Wright Sheffield UK "The difference between theory and practice is much smaller in theory than in practice..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
