I have retrofitted Dyna 2800, PC with much 3 hooked directly to original Dyna drivers. It was working well, but never consistent particularly in circular cuts. After long investigation, including discussion on this forum, it all came to quality of drivers.

Please recommend drivers for much3 to work with Dyna steppers:
They are made in USA by escape, and have 8 cables coming out of them. Motors data: 1.8 step, 140 watts, serial 0.88 oms 2.3 amps, parallel 0.22 oms 4.6 amps.
Thank you

I have a DM 2800 machine as well and will do some circular cutting to test the accuracy of my machine. I will let you know how it does.

Fred Fulmer

Stepmaster control  boards will run those motors - they are similar in spec to mine. There are suppliers on E-bay. You can get cards for one, two or three motors. They are adjustable for drive current, over voltage protection etc etc. You will have to adjust the wiring for the motors to make them bi-polar, but there is a diagram included with the board.

Mine worked straight from the box, and have performed faultlessly.

They interface directly with Mach 3.

Is it one of this?
http://www.stepmasternc.com/stepmasternc_009.htm

I did some circular cutting on my DM2800 using the wizard that comes with Mach3 and they measure fine. But I will need to do more then a few round pockets to know for sure.

Yes - that looks like the big brother of the ones I have - a single and a double board.

I don't know whether to advise you to get one board - four axis, or two double boards. I don't know whether you are happy with all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

The only problem with a 4 in 1 board, any fault at all means your whole machine is out of action. If you have seperate boards, you can still get some of the machine to work.

Mine is a lathe with a milling head. If one of my cards goes faulty, I can still run the lathe.

It is up to you, but mine certainly do the job !!

I've got a stepmaster board, the 4 axis, and I can't seem to figure out how to configure it with the stepper motors I have.
It's a mini CNC I bought off ebay without much..  *any* documentation.
The only information about the steppers are that they're 1/8 step.
but the mach3 configuration utillity talks about 1000 steps.... 

Does anyone have any advice or configuration files for the stepmaster?

If you e-mail me at jimpinder@tiscali.co.uk I have the instruction sheets on hard disk - I can e-mail them back to you.

Jim

Further to your post - 1/8 step means how far the motor turns per pulse on the "step" pin. The stepmaster boards can run 1/8, 1/4 1/2 or full.

So that means 8 pulses per step. What you will then need to find out is what angle the step is - e.g. 1.8 degree (which is fairly standard). So 8 pulses per step and 200 steps per rev. means 1,600 pulses to turn the motor one rev. If it is direct drive onto the axis, then all you need to know next is the pitch of the lead screw e.g. 10 revs per inch (again fairly standard) so you need 16,000 pulses per inch. Dont worry - mine are also geared down 3 to one, so I am on 48,000 pulses per inch - but both stepmaster and Mach3 can handle it.

Jim.