Good Morning to all. I think I have the correct section of the forum to ask this question, I have a WorkBee and I'm using a Black Box controller. The system works really well. I would like to add a 4th axis and I just don't know how to deal with the extra axis. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! Mark
Vectric's Wrapping feature (uses X or Y axis driver to run the rotary) See Tutorial Browser - VCarve Pro | Vectric
Yes I saw where the rotary axis was plugged into the X or the Y. But would that allow me to carve something like bust or a figure? As an example let's say I was carving the players in a chess set. I can see how that would work with something like the Queen but wouldn't I need all 4 axis to carve something like the Knight? I can see where that would work with something totally symmetrical.
You would definitely need true simultaneous 4 to do knights and possibly things like kings and bishops. For that, you just have to move on from basic Arduino/grbl based control to something like grblHAL (I haven't tried it, but it sounds good and @phil from seattle is involved, might be the lowest barrier to entry), Mach 3/4 (popular, but expensive and mediocre support), or LinuxCNC (what I use, closest system to real CNC controls, actually not as hard to get basics running as it may initially seem, but requires a PC with a parallel port or some expensive hardware).
Thanks Rob for your comments. PC with a parallel port, that sounds like a trip to the computer junkyard would be required and I would imagine something like Wndows XP. I will give your suggestions a good look!
I use Mesa 6i25 FPGA PCIe I/O cards as the parallel ports. It's not a cheap option at around $100, and Mesa components tend to be somewhat fragile and ESD-susceptible as they're intended for commercial integrators like Tormach, but it works very well. The step generation occurs onboard the card, so you're not reliant on CPU power, and one card has enough processing capacity to provide up to 9 axes at hundreds-of-KHz step rates via two parallel ports- one on the card, one optional via an extension socket. If you have a very simple machine with no encoders and fairly limited IO (like limits, maybe a spindle PWM speed control, not much else) you can leave it at that, and use either an inexpensive "5-axis CNC breakout", which just buffers and screw-terminal-converts your parallel plug to wire up your drivers, or a parallel-based driver system like the Gecko G540 (which like the BlackBox only includes 4 drivers, so you'd still have to fork your parallel cable to grab a couple more pins out to a separate single driver for the 4th axis). The much cheaper and simpler option is to run software step-gen via a decent quality (typically about $25- StarTech, maybe?) parallel PCI card. You still get a ton of axes and the ability to use a [different] wizard to set up the machine, but step rates will be lower according to your CPU speed. Might not be an issue for this type of machine, though. LinuxCNC is also the (Debian-based) operating system, so you don't need to worry about whether a donor computer comes with Windows or what version it might be. Pretty much just like running an older version of Ubuntu. It would be great if there were a way to clock-sync and pool planning resources between two Arduinos and just keep parallelizing them for more axes, but unfortunately it doesn't work like that. And I believe Sonny is now focusing on 32-bit MCUs rather than microcontrollers at this point, which really makes sense.
