Mach3 vs NC-studio
jallitt:
seems like a lot of routers out of China come with NC-studio which uses a PCI card to control the machines via a 15 pin cable.
I just picked up a used 1200x1200 machine with the aforementioned NC-studio and got it running and did a test cut with the last tool path I ran on a smaller mach3 controlled 500x300 machine and it was quite disappointing - lots of dwell marks and odd lines in the surface - admittedly this was a 1/72 scale model plane part which isn't what the machine was designed for but I figured it should be able to do a bit better.
So I wired a Mach compatible breakout board to some ribbon cable hooked up to a 15 pin D connector (so I didn't need to modify anything in the machine), set up and tuned the motors (7000mm/min rapids which is pretty good and maybe a bit fast) and re-ran the part. It's basically identical to the part made on my smaller machine.
Here's a comparison pic -
Mach/smoothstepper 500x300 machine on the left, Mach on the 1200x1200 machine in the middle, NC-studio on the 1200x1200 machine on the right.
The results speak for themselves and I'll be permanently wiring in the mach breakout board...
Tweakie.CNC:
So how exactly have you wired the breakout board to the 15 pin connector ??
Tweakie.
jallitt:
The router has a simple breakout board with a 15 pin connector on it. The NC-studio PCI card just has 3 sets of step/dir signals, 3 outputs to control the VFD speed, and 3 limit switch inputs so I just traced the wiring and have the mach breakout board between the parallel port and a 15-pin connector like this:
I didn't want to start disconnecting wires in the machine until I was sure this would work. Wasn't 100% sure I'd be able to start the spindle the way the VFD is configured.
Now that I know where all the wires go I can replace the 15-pin BOB in the machine with the parallel port BOB.
Tweakie.CNC:
Thanks, I think I understand what you have done now.
Tweakie.
solargrown:
Jallit, I'm trying to do exactly what you have done. Changing an NCstudio machine to Mach3.
I'm trying to figure out how you configured mach3 to control the spindle with the 3 outputs to VFD.
Could somebody point me in the right direction please?
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