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I did pretty much what you seem to want. My CNC machine had a parallel port driver board. I disconnected the motors from that, and connected to the TinyG.
However, TinyG does not support 48 volts. Mine ran at 36 volts, but no go. The driver chips on the TinyG can only handle 30 volts max. In my case, I had to replace the power supply, about $40.
(But believe me, I am thrilled to be able to connect my CNC to my laptop. I do not keep a desktop unit connected anymore. To use my CNC, I would have to find a monitor, find a keyboard, etc. Now, anytime I want to run my CNC, my laptop handles it.)
If you want to run 48 volts with the TinyG, you would have to connect external 48 volt motor drivers to the step and direction pins on TinyG. I haven’t done it, but I thought about it. In the end, it was less hassle for me to drop to 24 volts than buy four drivers.
Also, I don’t know how your software will interface with TinyG.
By the way, are you sure you fried the board and not the power supply?
I hope that helps.
Tom
I am hoping to just disable the driving chips and use my current drivers that are more robust. Years ago I’d just do it and have wires everywhere. However, I’m polarized against rat’s nest of wires since I’ve been living so ghetto with my small business that’s centralized around one CNC machine and slowly I buy stuff to organized my setup 🙂 The chips the TinyG uses probably aren’t a match for Geckos or THB6064AH when at 48 volts so I’d like to stick with what I use. When I did a motor swap and some other work I went from 30 IPM of cutting to about 130, and I don’t want to ever go back.
For the atom board I think it’s fried or maybe something else since it powers on but only shows the intel screen, then the BIO config screen if I strike the key fast enough, then the screen just stops working before it loads ubuntu or even if its in BIOs for 2 seconds. I’ve tried two LCD monitors and can confirm it’s not them. Next step I guess is to try a new stick of ram and remove the SSD, then boot of a CD. But I really think it’s the onboard GPU unfortunately 🙁
But with a TinyG I can use any cheap netbook that stays on and not worry about latency!Hmm. I do a lot of organic shapes that aren’t at all square.
I am trying to wrap my head around this so here it goes.
So TinyG goes point to point without any “curves” (smoothed interpolation is the term I think of since I used to do computer animation) between each point or gcode line? If I were trying to switch over I’d need to control my milling speed by how many points or “accuracy” (EI Gcode lines for the modeL) since the controller WILL hit each point. So in essence what separates it from exact stop mode? Between each point will I get a straight line or a curve? If it went up and down a “bump” would it go straight from each dot or naturally follow the arc to a certain degree? How will LinuxCNC fair against TinyG overall with speed if they are both being fed a reasonably smooth program?
Just to show I’m not crazy here is a bit of my work, it’s an island that’s 50 miles from where I live.
.125″ ballnose bit, .003″ accuracy, and I was getting maybe 80IPM for 3d profiling but the machine likes to shake some :/
This subject isn’t something I’m very experienced with so I’m attempting to get some conclusions drawn up 🙂
I’m 21, have a few years of college for a business degree, and then there is my two years of CNC experience;
but past that I know nothing about CNC machine control software/hardware. My experience is how poorly exact path mode is in LinuxCNC and how shaky my machine would be if I used it.
If TinyG operates smoothly for 3d profiling then that’s what I want.
For the experience I’m thinking of just picking up an arduino due then seeing what an axis does under it’s control.That would be great to see what happens with it 🙂
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x0tuftjne9brvj9/1_8FP.ngc
This is a LONG program so maybe just the first part and when it hits parallel passes?
If this all works out I’ll be more than happy to show off what TinyG can do on my machine.
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