Bed mill retrofit & practice for the next machine

Hello,

I was looking to upgrade an old bed mill to linuxCNC partly for practice before building a machine from scratch.

I m looking to control 5 axes or more. The next machine will also be a router and I will need two servos for the X axis.

AC servos? VFD and ATC spindle recommendations?

What motion control card would be best for this?

Thank you

In another post it looked like the card I would want is the 5i25 + 7i77 unless there is a more updated version of this or another variants?

I was thinking of using DMM motors unless there was a recommendation for something else.

I appreciate any help I can get!

Thank you

the 7i77 is an analog board. the DMM drives can do that but they can also do step and direction as well. they also can run on 120v or 240v or even do 3 phase power if you have that option.i think the board you choose boils down to how accurate the system needs to be? and how complex you want the control to be? semi closed loop or fully close loop ? lots of stuff to consider before making a choice on mesa hardware.

DMM products are reasonable in price and the customer support is pretty good on top of that.

the decent ATC spindles i have seen can get pricey. so that end of it is based on how much you want to spend and how solid the machine ends up being once you get it built. a moving gantry machine tends to run out of rigidity before the HP of the spindle runs out. so you need to think about what you really need to do what your planning on making?