Hello, I'm building a machine in my garage that initially was supposed to be a plasma table, no leaning towards a router but what is important right now is I have the X and Y axes mostly assembled and wired. The Y axis is driven by a pair of ballscrews with NEMA 34 steppers, driven by DQ860MA (fairly cheap) drivers. I've got this axis wired up to an Arduino mega 2560 running GRBL. I just finished attaching a (modified) part of a redbox (dvd rental) machine that has a ballscrew, rail w/ carriage, 24V servo with controller board nicely packaged so that I could just bolt it to my gantry.
I think I am going to be using Machinekit on a beaglebone black to control this thing going forward. I have no experience with machinekit/linuxCNC but am familiar with microcontrollers and 3d printer controls which is the reason I defaulted to an arduino for control when I started this project. My question pertains to controlling the servo on the X axis. The controller board uses a PIC-SERVO-SC (http://www.jrkerr.com/boards.html) - the board seems to be a custom version made for redbox. I have been able to power up the board and connect via RS422 and control it using the test software provided by the maker of the PIC-SERVO-SC. The controller offers several control modes. My instinct was to use step/direction input mode, mostly because I understand it. I'd wire step and direction from the arduino/beaglebone to the servo controller and essentially be done with it. The servo controller would still utilize the encoder for accurate positioning, transparent to the machine controller. This is probably simplest, as everything would look like a stepper to the machine controller. I'm wondering if it would be advantageous to utilize one of the other control modes instead - I'm especially interested in controlling it by serial commands. I've got a few of these servos and at least 2 functional control boards. I could connect them via an RS485 bus which would reduce the amount of cabling I need to run from the controller to the gantry. How tough would it be to control servos this way using machinekit? I'm very comfortable writing code to control serial equipment, but have no knowledge of the machinekit architecture so I wanted to check here before spending time on it. In summary, I'd like to control at least one axis via serial commands while using steppers for another and am wondering how feasible that is. I'm hoping to get my wiring done this weekend and need to decide if I wire up an RS485 bus or if I should just stick to the familiar stepper wiring. Thank you -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
