Actually that's more than a breakout board, it's also a motion controller.   People on here have used them but often have problems.  To start with it needs a plug in for mach3 or mach4 - does the documentation say this is available with the unit?

To start with it needs a plug in for mach3 or mach4 - does the documentation say this is available with the unit?

Could you please explain what is that plug?

I could just tell you but then you'll have another question, and another, and another...  Instead, why not carefully read the Mach3 manual and do your best to learn, and if you still can't work it out come back.  CNC is complicated, you have to learn for yourself.

I could just tell you but then you'll have another question, and another, and another...

Silly me, I thought that the purpose of forums is to share knowledge... thanx for correcting me.

Hi,
that is an RnR board, one of the many Chinese made clones and exactly the type I recommend against. They are as you say cheap,
and to my way of thinking is the only good thing about them. It's your money, time and energy, and thus its your choice.
Good luck.

Craig

Hi,
those boards or ones very like them, some are green, some blue, some red...etc have been on the market for about ten years.

There must have been a clever Chinese engineer, or maybe a group of them, whom designed the first boards and wrote the plugin. The plugin is
.dll file that lives on the PC that adapts the numeric output of Mach3 to the motion board and provides the firmware for the board. At the time
it was quite the trick.....but it was never developed further. That engineer, or group of them, have long since departed the scene and now these boards
are made by half a dozen different Chinese companies all copying the original design.

The problem is they don't have a clue how they work. If they even have a copy of the plugin it is just the object file, not the source code.
If you asked the manufacturer of the board to fix a bug....they can't. They don't know how it works and they don't have the source code
to work out how it works, much less the talent to implement any changes.

Why would anyone bother investing all that time and effort into working out how something works and even improving it only to have the other
five Chinese companies rip it off? This is where the Chinese practice of pirating technology really comes crashing down......they have created an
environment where innovation and improvement cannot be re-paid, and therefore there IS NO innovation and improvement.

There are copies of the .dll file floating around and I have no doubt you'll find a working copy eventually. These boards miss on things like lathe threading, THC,
laser ops, backlash comp and even probing is handled in a non-standard manner and works only with modified pirate copies of Mach3.
There is no Mach4 plugin for these boards, and because of the piracy problem I mentioned above, neither will there ever be one.

You want the forum to share information....well there it is, I'm just not sure you will like it.

Craig

Quote from: JohnHaine on April 07, 2023, 09:09:19 AM

I could just tell you but then you'll have another question, and another, and another...

Silly me, I thought that the purpose of forums is to share knowledge... thanx for correcting me.

I'm very happy to help people who help themselves and you will see I have done that quite a lot on this forum, but that doesn't extend to providing tutorials on the basics that can be found out from the manual.

joeaverage/Craig - thanx once more for the comprehensive info. seems that the better solution is the UC100.