Merry Christmas all, several months ago I took delivery of a CNC Router from Acctek. It is arguably a good starter machine with effective 600x1200mm work holding. I was not surprised that it came with a dated version of Artcam but really had no expectation that they had sent Mach3 with a license. The pandemic has been difficult but now have the extra needed to acquire a bonafide licence with Artsoft.
 As I was getting to know the equipment and the software I realized that something was a little odd with the version they sent. It won't allow me to install a Joystick plug in, and I can't enter machine soft limits and my probe script is sketchy. I have put this off for far too long and want to know if I am going to have to get rid of the XHC 4 Axis USB motion controller and up the game with an ethernet card. Anyone been here before? Suggestions welcome!

Hi,
an ethernet connected external motion controller is a substantial improvement. Ethernet is very much less subject to noise and its increased speed
results in faster motion buffer updates.

I use an Ethernet SmoothStepper ($180) and Mach4, and have done for seven years. I used Mach3 prior to that but Mach4 is light years ahead IMHO.
The SmoothStepper has both a Mach3 plugin AND a Mach4 plugin....so you can use either. If however you are planning on buying a license then I would
recommend Mach4, it's only an extra $25.00 and is so much better. Note that all development on Mach3 ceased seven years ago which makes it a dubious proposition
for a new installation.

The SmoothStepper has, arguably, the best and most complete Mach4 plugin, certainly at the 'value' end of the market. The Hicon Integra is also good but costs $600
without any special activations....and goes up from there.

The UC100 (don't under any circumstances get a Chinese ripoff from Ebay/Amazon) is well priced but has one port only (17 IOs) and is USB connected.
The UC300 and UC400 are ethernet connected, have plenty of IO and work well with Mach3 and Mach4, although they miss on some of the realtime supports that the SmoothStepper has.
The PoKeys 57CNC is ethernet connected, plenty of IO, good plugins with both Mach3 and Mach4, although the SmoothStepper still marginally outshines the PoKeys for realtime supports in Mach4.
The CSMIO is good with Mach3 but has a buggy Mach4 plugin and hard to recommend at 600Euro.
Avoid Chinese junk, rubbish support and often only work with pirate copies of Mach3. There is one company (XHC) selling a Mach4 motuion controller, avoid like the plague, it doesn't work with Mach4's GUI.

Craig

Hi Craig,
Your generous reply is going to be bronzed and set on my mantle as the new benchmark.
Forgive my late reply but after a no-tech holiday, that has taken a while to unpack. I have researched all your suggestions, and ruled out all but the ESS, but there is also the matter of the breakout board no? Perhaps it is not needed in some situations. Mine is only 3 stepper drivers, three endstop switches, a probe and a VFD. In case I do require the component, I have found one that will manage my 24V PSU and provides 5VDC for the ESS. This unit, the MB3, appears to be well built if a larger footprint than the XHC & loads more than I need.
I have little (effectively zero) experience setting up from scratch. Still mildly anxious about that. Maybe not the ports and pins, but certainly the motor tuning. Also regarding my XHC WHB04BX pendant, is that also destined for the bin? I have read one thread on this forum that suggests the plugin may not work in Mach4. It was a dated posting.
Rough math for the outlay at approx $800 CAD less an applicable pendant. On a positive note, all the components are in stock and just a click away.
I will be a frequent flyer in the Mach4 forum as I attempt this I fear. My desk is full with designs in both Vectric and Fusion360 that are intensive and I wonder how much down time I will incur.
Happy New Year,
Chris

Hi,
the ESS is an external motion controller. All its IO are 5V logic level. You could hook direct to other devices like stepper drives, but its fraught. One small mistake
with the hookup and you've fried your ESS. A breakout board does not add anything in the way of logic or smarts but it does buffer the ESS IO and provides much better
connections for wires etc. As such I would consider a breakout board as essential.

The MB3 by CNCRoom is indeed a good quality board with a good balance of inputs and outputs, mostly 24V capable, and has features to control a VFD. Note however it is designed
and paired with an ESS, it will not work nearly as well, if at all, with another motion control board.

I used Homan Desgins MB02's (no relation to the MB3 of CNCRoom) for my mini mill. I had two of them. They are bidirectional single port boards, and they proved to be fantastic
and I used them for seven years. They are still only 5V input/output and had no relays or PWM circuits. If you wanted extra features I would use a handful of electronic parts and
add them to the basic board.

For my new build mill (about six months old now) I was using servos for which I wanted differential step/dir signaling, and 24V tolerant inputs and outputs to match the 24V
industrial norm to which my servos are built. I also wanted an extra circuit to turn on/turn off the electromagnetic brake on the Z axis.  I knew what I needed and wanted and
what I did not want or need, so I decided to make my own breakout board, in fact I split the one board into two.

The first board, or port 1 of the ESS has 10 differential (+-2.5V) outputs for up to five servos, only three equipped thus far, five Alarm inputs, one for each servo, and two 24V outputs,
an Enable and a Reset, which is commoned to all five servos.

The second board I elected to make input dominated, ie pins 2-9 of each ports 2 and 3 of the ESS as inputs. This gives me 26 24V sourcing (5mA) inputs, one relay output for the VFD,
a PWM output again for the VFD, and 6 general purpose 24V sourcing and sinking outputs.

All up it cost less than an MB3, but of course took a lot longer to make and test. I've been using it for about six months, and I'm really happy with it. I would if rebuilding change the PWM circuit I used,
I sort of rushed that. It works fine but I could do better....funny I recall my Mum saying that!

If you wish to make one I  could post the circuit diagram and board artwork.

The XHC pendant may still well be useful. smurph, one of the leading developers of Mach4 and a clever cookie, has written a plugin for the XHC pendants. I used a VistaCNC pendant for seven/eight years,
but it started to crap out, particularly in warm weather. It has worked well enough that I should just buy another, but what I did was buy a really top quality (2nd hand) MPG and make my own
pendant. I finished it about 10 days ago and its proving to be everything I wanted, but nothing that I don't.

I have had my ESS for seven years, and I have bought another four for various retrofits in the years since, and never had a failure, nor even a serious bug with an ESS. Quite frankly the cost of
an ESS is small potatoes....and I've never regretted buying them. My servos,  two 750W Delta B2s and one 750W Delta B2 with electromagnetic brake and three day DHL shipping from China
cost me $1900USD. Who bloody cares what an ESS costs.....it's still chicken feed when compared to the servos alone.

Craig

Hi,
my breakout board files.

Craig

Hi Craig,
I have been wanting to report back for some time. Weather and tech meltdown here has me running defense. How generous to offer the single port design. I am so overwhelmed right now, there may not be a proper adjective.
I am setting the files aside for a good look.
A project for later this winter - my hands are full with trying to get this fledgling biz on its feet. No end to it.

Ordered the ESS /MB3 combo on Jan 1st right after your mild scolding and it arrived @  11am EST Jan 7. Rather impressive seeing as how CNC Room is out of Bangkok Thailand! And yet I could not get a simple AA rated ER20 spring collet delivered in the same time span. Was trying to get to the root of a vibration issue with a new indexable 35mm facing mill. I was reading unreasonable runout. The tool was not the problem, it was the collet, the sudden red face as I realized that I had attempted to tram my spindle with the same 8mm collet. That was certainly a new guy's pitfall for sure. Assumptions are made. Foreheads are slapped. I will always test my tooling purchases before use from now on.

I have discovered that the XHC Pendant is faulty right off the shelf - pulses generated are not accurate. And I have been suffering with that mystery for two yrs. So it is going to be replaced with the VistaCNC P2-S next cycle.

As you demonstrate amply, the outlay is trivial for the ESS and MB3. The quality is obvious without even getting my reading glasses. Can't wait to dive in. To that end, the support & documentation at Warp9 is impressive. Same for CNC Room. Night and day difference from my previous installation. No pictographs in the PDFs with poor English translations as after thought. Heaven awaits.
It will be tight fitting the MB3 in the footprint of the XHC MKV-3 card  and doubt all terminations will reach. Not much slack.

To add to the excitement my PC in the shop has just died inexplicably and currently getting a laptop with Win10 set up with Mach3 to finish current jobs with the existing motion controller. If that isn't an insult after injury, I don't what is. I am just heading over to the shop in the frigid midnight air to try to get ahead of this.

Hope its warmer where you live. The mercury just sank out of sight. 0 deg F or -20C

Perhaps you could suggest the conductor that is commonly employed to connect the signal/data wire. 20AWG is what I have been looking at so far to extend the wire if need be. The current terminations are labelled and have ferrules that would be nice to keep intact.  Perhaps it is not wise to extend some conductors via butt splice, solder and shrink tube. Shielding might suffer in this process.  As I read more re best practices in regards to the latter, I might be into a more involved re-wire job. Your take? 

Once again, thanks for the direction and help.

Later,
Chris

Hi,

Hope its warmer where you live. The mercury just sank out of sight. 0 deg F or -20C

Mid-summer here, and pleasant, has not been too hot yet, and has been enough rain to keep the place green, and long may it continue.

I would probably just extend the wires being easiest and most direct even if it demands patience. Unless your impedance levels are poorly chosen it should have minimal
impact on noise performance.

It bemuses me that people shield this and shield that, ferrite rings here there and everywhere without ever asking the question 'why are my signal circuits so prone to
electrical noise?. Is there a way to design and build them that makes those circuits less susceptible?'

The answer is YES, you can, and bloody well should, design your circuits so that they are invulnerable to noise, not impervious, but invulnerable.

As an example in the ESS_Split1 board I posted earlier I used dual op-amps to generate differential Step and Direction signals for the servos. But note that the impedance levels at the inputs
of the op-amps ranges between 4.7kOhm and 10kOhm, while the signal levels are only 2.5V, and therefore subject to noise. My mistake. I discovered the other day when I was trying to drive
my Allen Bradley spindle servo motor in Step/Dir mode. The residual noise was enough to make it impractical. My Delta axis servos have a lower input impedance and
are less noise prone and so the same circuit that works well with the Delta servos does not work with the Allen Bradley servo, all due to impedance levels.

I have since redesigned the circuit but this time using genuine line driver ICs (AEIC7272). They are rather more expensive than I am accustomed to paying for analog ICs, but the
speed and noise performance is important to me. I will have the new ICs in a week and make a new board thereafter.

All of my Home/Limit/Probe circuits are 5mA 24V sourcing and I have NO false detections despite none of them being shielded. That is simply because the signal (5mA 24V) far out weighs
any potential EMI induced noise, ie impedance levels.

Craig

Just a thought on noise, interference and general mischief. Make sure there is enough current running through your contacts for limiit switches, E-stops and similar. The inputs of PLCs, motion controllers and similar often have a very high impedance and will source or sink very little current. I have had some issues with non-CNC machinery that had a stack of aux contacts on some motor overloads driving a PLC input. The contacts were rated for 5 mA minimum and weren't carrying nearly that. The upshot of all this was a series of stoppages, and the troublesome contact would only show about 200mV across it. It's down to the surface electrochemistry of the oxide layers on the contacts. Not enough current, and they will stop conducting well. A good sized pulldown resistor on the device input (if sinking) will sort this out and give you a clear go or no go on the contacts. Get about 10-50mA going through the contacts and you should be golden. It has the added advantage of making the input highly resistant to noise.

Hi BluePinnacle,
yes that is correct, and another name for that phenomenon is impedance levels, and that has bearing on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio. If the signal is ten or better
times the noise then false triggering is almost gone.

Most newcomers design, or perhaps don't design, but just build their signalling circuits only to find that they are noise prone and have to shield everything.
Had they given some thought to impedance levels, or equivalently the current through the switch contacts as you have posted, then their circuits would
be very much less noise prone and probably work WITHOUT shielding.

None of my Home, Limit, Probe and Estop input circuits are shielded and I have no problems with noise. The other day however I laid a new two core Estop cable
and passed it through the same hole that the VFD-to-Spindle cable passed....and I had problems. Once I re-routed the Estop cable away from the VFD cable it was fine.
The point is that choosing impedance levels (currents) is good....its not magic. You can still get noise problems if the noise environment exceeds your design levels.

Craig

true, VFDs are awful for noise. Was the cable from the VFD screened?