Driver board for new Taig mill

Hi,

I'm trying to build a system using a Taig mill and closed loop stepper motors. Mesa is taking forever to ship anything and I need to have my machine running by December. I started looking for other possibilities.

Would this setup work?
Startech PCIe Parallel card - www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/Parallel...Parallel-Card-~PEX1P
Pico Systems Stepper controller - pico-systems.com/univstep.html
3x Gecko step+dir stepper drivers

How much is involved with getting everything working? I see Pico provides some config files for LinuxCNC. Would this be fairly plug and play?

BishopCNC15 wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to build a system using a Taig mill and closed loop stepper motors. Mesa is taking forever to ship anything and I need to have my machine running by December. I started looking for other possibilities.

Would this setup work?

Pico Systems Stepper controller - pico-systems.com/univstep.html

What you would actually want is the Universal PWM Controller and matching PWM servo amplifiers.
See pico-systems.com/images/Taig.jpg for a Taig I did about a decade ago, using this system. I hear from the owner every once in a while, it is still running.

How much is involved with getting everything working? I see Pico provides some config files for LinuxCNC. Would this be fairly plug and play?

Yes, you need to select the sample config file univpwmv from the sample configs, and then go in and set the encoder resolution to match your machine. Then, you would need to do the servo tuning. I have a guide on how to do that.

Jon

I'm pretty new to this, I'm kind of confused. I would use the pwm driver board to run stepper motors?

BishopCNC15 wrote:

I'm pretty new to this, I'm kind of confused. I would use the pwm driver board to run stepper motors?

OOPS! Sorry!

I saw "Taig mill and closed loop stepper motors" in your first message and read SERVO, while you do, clearly say STEPPER.

So, much of what I said was wrong.

Starting fresh, yes, you could use our Universal Stepper Controller with the stepper driver of your choice. Gecko stepper drives are quite awesome.
It will accept encoder feedback. This cannot fix a stall, once the motor has stalled, it will not recover until the step pulses are stopped for a moment for it to get back in sync. But, it WILL detect and silently correct an occasional missed step, and it will also detect a stall or major loss of steps and stop the machine.

It will also allow you to graph the response and get a very good idea of the limits of the machine, so you can set the max accel and velocity to safe values.

Jon