We had a lot of challenges on this project. Anyone who has every built a CNC systems will tell you that you will learn one heck of a lot during that first build. We sure did. There were endless weeks of building tiny little parts, aligning things, trying something different, finding paint that would cure at temperatures below zero in January, figuring out the difference between machine coordinates and work coordinates in Mach3…
There were also some parts just snapped into place and worked right out of the box. For us, the motion control from Vital Systems was one of those “it just works” parts of the project.
The few times we did have a question or wanted to change something, Marc and Rufi were right there. They never promised it, but they even answered my emailed tech support questions at 11:00 at night and also on the weekends.
I have time on my hands to write this review because our router table is in hour 6 of a 9 hour 3D carving job with zero drama. We are productive, happy, and expect this table will be running 16 hours a day for a while.
The carving motions accelerate and decelerate our huge gantry smoothly, the spindles do their work, and our motion controller is delightfully boring, just like it should be.
The HiCONN Integra did cost us a more than some of the other motion controls we looked into. The six axis support, encoder support, position correction, great documentation, and follow up support allow us to easily reach the conclusion it was money very well spent. We are not experts in this stuff, but we did find some experts at Vital Systems who made it possible for us to build a very fast, smooth, and reliable motion control system for a fraction of what we could have spent otherwise. We never thought we could get what we now have on our budget.
I will do more posts later about a bunch of the “wish I knew it the first time” stuff, but most of that is related to learning Mach3, tuning servos, writing post processors, and out M6 macro of a quad z table.
Thanks Rufi and Marc!!!
(Pictures of everything coming once I figure out the image posting...)