I have gotten ahold of a sherline CNC lathe. It is complete with steppers but does not have any controller board / drivers. Can I use the blackbox to retrofit this?
It is a small lathe. The two steppers are listed at 2.1 amps. The sindle motor is listed at 90V DC but I have the DC electronics speed control board. I will have to figure out how the Blackbox can control this board. It looks as though it is normally controlled manually through a potentiometer. So maybe a digipotentiometer (Digital Potentiometer - 10K - COM-10613 - SparkFun Electronics) could be used and controlled by the blackbox?
Are they Bipolar? Voltage? (3-6V for BlackBox ideally, higher will limit acceleration), Inductance? (1-2mH ideally, higher will be slower on top speed) - that's why the datasheet's important - you need the full picture, all values, not just one parameter We provide industry standard 0-10v and PWM outputs. Does this board have a manual or other documentation to see what inputs its accepts?
Yes the steppers are 3.2V. I believe the inductance is 3.6 but I will have to get a mutimeter to measure it for sure. I contacted Sherline for any documentation available on the board. The most common use of the board though is to just be controlled with a physical potentiometer.
Should be usable then. Spindle we'll confirm when we get more details then. In the meantime, checkout docs.openbuilds.com > Software and also the BlackBox X32 sections
Still working on this build. I wanted to make sure these limit switches would work. They are the stock switches on the sherline cnc lathe. Closest part I could find. Looking at the documentation they are most like the lever micro limit switches - I just wanted to make to make sure that they should read as open when connected, and then closed when pressed.
Or other way round. Just match up $5 Invert settings. Without filters Normally Closed might be a little better