I'm currently building a CNC mill. I will be using M3 software to control the machine, but there are a few things I'm not understanding.

With step and direction commands, how is feedrate controlled?

Also, I know a lot of people like to use steppers or DC brush motors with Gecko's, however I got an incredible deal on some brushless Parker motors and Parker drives. The drives however use a propriatry language known as "X" language. It's a powerful command system that allows me to establish a large number of conditions for a movement. A tech at Parker has indicated that they can work off of step and direction commands as well, however in the manual for the drives I can find no such data. Hopefully the tech will be willing to work with me on how to setup the drives for those conditions. Has anyone ever used "X" language drives, like the OEM670x, OEM770x, or TQ10x drives?

Thanks and I know there will be a million more questions to follow but I think so far I've bit off a lot already, so I'll stop here.

Pete

Pete,
The best thing to do at this time is to read the Mach3 manual http://www.artofcnc.ca/UsingMill.pdf this will help with the questions that you are having about step and dir. As for the Parker stuff... sorry I have never used that.

Thanks fo the reply, I'll check that out!

I think I might just wind up using Rutex drives, they're fairly simple like the Gecko's.

Is it possible to use the Rutex drives with a G-rex since both the Gecko drives and Rutex drives use similar inputs? This probably would have been so much easier had I just gone with DC brush motors and Gecko's, but the deal on these motors was just too good to turn down! Besides, being a little more difficult just forces you to learn more, and that's never a bad thing.

Pete

There is no problem setting up the rutex drives to run on the GRex but you should know that the Grex is not ready to run a mill at this time...

Thanks again