Hi,
I thought the servo drives themselves took care of closing the loop and all that? There was talk of me possibly needing a whole new motor/drive, control etc system....but I don't see why any of that would be necessary?
That is correct. If you had them running with Mach3, an open loop step/direction controller, then they will work with Mach4
which is also an open loop step/direction controller.
Your existing breakout board will still work if you plug in two (of three) ports of an ESS.
As I replied in your other thread I think getting your pendant to work may be possible but I suspect would be difficult
to do so. Even if you updated the board to a 57 or a 57CNC for which there is a Mach4 plugin you still have the problem of
Mach4 decoding the control panel switches.
Note also that Mach4 can have but one active motion controller. Thus if you have an ESS to drive your breakout board
then any PoKeys board MUST be a secondary data input board. PoKeys devices are good at that. A number of users have
used an ESS as the motion control board and then used a secondary PoKeys board to construct their own control panel.
If you were prepared to reverse engineer the existing pendant you could do the same thing. Are you up for the challenge?
Or just buy a Mach4 ready pendant, the one I use costs $160.
Craig