Gentlemen,

I have a router machine with 400 count per turn quadrature encoders on each of 3 axes. This boils down to 1600 counts per inch. Since Mach3 does not use the encoder feedback to verify the correct movement of the motors, I was looking for a board that will. I have had the router sometimes lose registration because the motor missed a step, and I want the control board to compensate for this if it happens.

Will the smooth stepper board handle this?

If so, how?

Thanks,
Rick

No afraid not. I am presuming it is steppers you have as if it was servos then your drives should be closing the loop. There is a board from Ron Rogers that monitors the encoders and will halt mach if a user set following error occurs. It will not however update on the fly.
Hood

Hi Rbickle

Hi

I found these boards and am considering them? They are stepper in but use brushed DC motors, The encoder is connected to the drive board. The board will accept step and direction instructions from Mach 3. when i phoned and asked if there were any lost pulse issues they said no.  You would have to change the stepper drives as well.

http://cncteknix.com/portal/content/view/77/146/

Has anyone used these boards ?

Cheers

John Mac

On my milling, I had installed linear scale to verify if my position was ok,  i setup max permissible error(.010) ,   In my macropump, small program verify the difference between machine position and encoder position, if the error is too big, the program was feed hold,  and send message error on error windows... but the position of encoder was not use by mach3, it only verify if the difference was OK....

John
 fdos uses them with the SS, I think you have to make sure you dont use any electronic gearing with them when using the SS but otherwise they are good.
Hood

If I connect encoders to normal inputs of the SS and configure mach to display them, what will be the max. encoder frequency that SS is able to handle? (to know if I can use normal inputs of SS to monitor position, as others wrote above)