I'm renovating an old engraving machine... I will be interfacing it to a decent sized pic using the PMP and the USB... This way I will be able to interface a PC quite easily.... BUT!!!! as I'm as busy as a bumble bee, I have no idea when I'll get round to it!!!!Hi there,
Anyone here try any of these machines yet? They are small, roughly 1 foot by 1 foot, and come with all motors and software. They look accurate enough to make PC boards.
The sell for around $500 USD and up.
Only down side 'seems' to be that they need a parallel port.
Yep! I have also heard this... But No experience at all...I will definitely use a pic to interface to the engraver.... I will be using it to create PCB'sHi,
That sounds interesting too.
I have read that many of the emulated parallel ports do not work very well. Any ideas here?
Hi,
That sounds interesting too.
I have read that many of the emulated parallel ports do not work very well. Any ideas here?
You can buy a parallel card for your computer but you can get an old, used PC with a parallel port cheaper.
In the future, I will cut wider so it will be easier to solder without bridging.
Thanks Nigel
I used my 75 year old milling machine that I converted to CNC using large stepper motors.
One thing is for sure, we could make a stand alone parallel port with a PIC or something, that could be driven from just about anything else. But getting the software to comply with the 'anything else' would be the challenge. We may have to make our own software too then. This begs the question, can we get the specs of the CNC machine, ie the protocol it needs from the parallel port to run properly?
Ideally though, i'd like to see the CNC control work from another port, not the parallel port, which has been phased out for the most part now.
Another question that comes up:
What actually does the microstepping? Is it the control board of the CNC, or the software in the PC?
I used my 75 year old milling machine that I converted to CNC using large stepper motors. The free Mach3 program compensates for the 0.030” backlash nicely.
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