4 Axis Driver Board

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4 Axis Driver Board

Postby bdring » Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:58 am

I designed this board for use with a 3 axis laser + rotary, but it would also work well for small CNCs and 3D printers.

4x_pl_01.jpg
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby cpdude » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:53 am

Very nice! I LOVE my 3 axis board!!

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2.x laser ( Mach3 | SmoothStepper | FSE RetinaEngrave)| DIY CNC Router (EMC2) | Prusa I3 3d printer | Building a Wolfstock deta printer | Rhino v5
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby mxk » Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:45 am

Bart,
I would be very interested in one of these, for use with an Arduino I'm getting from the ShapeOko Kickstarter project. How do I order one?
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Ordering one.

Postby bdring » Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:47 am

Contact me at bdring@buildlog.net
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby twehr » Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:25 pm

bdring wrote:I designed this board for use with a 3 axis laser + rotary, but it would also work well for small CNCs and 3D printers.


Do you just electronically switch the output of the controller's y axis from one drive to another to handle the rotary drive?
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby bdring » Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:53 pm

It has four independent drivers.

This is for use when you have (4) separate signals. It is targeted at the DSP, where the other interface board would have a lot of unused circuitry. It also gives you a terminal block, rather than a 'd' connector to simplify wiring. There will always be some amount of work because the rotary attachment needs to be removed. This board has a feature where you can remotely disable the motors while doing this.

The other application is a small CNC machine. The fourth axis driver could be replaced with a relay driver for spindle control.


The schematic is online now.

http://www.buildlog.net/cnc_laser/erp/g ... ber=C32013
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby dditzler » Tue Feb 14, 2012 12:12 pm

I have a few questions.

I am planing on using this with a larger ShapeOko design. By scaling up the size Bart suggested I use two motors to power the gantry. If I do that I assume I am using one Polulo driver for each motor. So basically it will still be a 3-axis control but two drivers will be used for one axis. I have read about cloning that one axis in Mach 3 so basically your 4th axis is can then be assigned to drive the other end of the gantry. So let me know if I am off base on this or if you know of a link that describes this better?

The second question I have is that on the 3-axis controller there were places to wire up relays and limit switches. How with this 4 axis board could I wire up limit switches for the router and is there a way to set up a z-axis switch to use to set the height and/or a touch probe? It looks like a lot of controllers I've been looking at use the pins 10-15 for this. Is there a better board I should be looking at that does this or is it easy enough to use this board and add that functionality some how?

thank you..

cheers
-david
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby bdring » Tue Feb 14, 2012 1:30 pm

The 4 axis is a pretty simple board that was initially targeted at people using laser controllers that already handle the limits etc. You could do all the wiring yourself with a breakout board. You can clone a drive for an axis in Mach3 and EMC. I always assumed you could do it electrically too by running the step and direction signals to two drivers. I have never tried it though.
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby Improbable Construct » Fri Mar 02, 2012 10:16 pm

Are any of these boards still available? I would like to use one for a ShapeOko. I plan on a larger CNC in the future and would like to use Mach3 from the get go.
If there are none left, does anybody have anything else that would work and is low cost? Thanks, Brandon.
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Re: 4 Axis Driver Board

Postby bdring » Sat Mar 03, 2012 1:04 am

I have 9 raw boards, I can sell them as kits.
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