[dnelso]

Installed a smooth stepper on my IH mill and the early tests look good. It is still in beta testing so a few things need work but overall very smooth operation. I can use a laptop to run the mill and dont have to change any of the setup. Just plug in 2 parallel ports and the usb and go.
Later DN
smooth stepper
http://www.warp9td.com/

[philbur]

What made you go for this stepper controller rather than say Gecko.

Phil

Installed a smooth stepper on my IH mill and the early tests look good. It is still in beta testing so a few things need work but overall very smooth operation. I can use a laptop to run the mill and dont have to change any of the setup. Just plug in 2 parallel ports and the usb and go.
Later DN
smooth stepper
http://www.warp9td.com/

[dnelso]

The name is a little confusing. I still use gecko drives for the servo motors. The smooth stepper replaces the parralell ports with a usb box that simulates a parralell port. You can run a laptop instead of full size pc.It also can generate a lot nicer pulse train to the geckos.
DN

[nuzzget]

So does it plug right into a stepper motor driver like this one?

http://www.probotix.com/stepper_moto...ers/ProboStep/

Or does that have to be different?

[Cruiser]

The smooth stepper is like a separate brain, it reads from mach via usb, gecko's, and all hookups are connected to simple breakout board, smooth stepper has pports which cable connect to the simple bboard's. The biggest advantage is that it has its own speed to run on up to 4ghrz or somethin like that, FAST ! Mach is set at 25,000. Mach does the math and sends streams of code to SS etc. and the servo's like the smooth fast pulse stream ! It will allow a small increase in potential speed, but I left it at 110 for velocity, even tho I got into 135 before servos complained.
there are a few disadvantages, NO backlash yet, It can be a bit touchy, yet is showing to be a very dependable solution when all the settings are proper.
ON a similar note, I downloaded mach 3.042.029 today and did an over install from v.020 and what a mistake ! SS went crazy, mach couldn't home machine, read WPO, couldn't probe tool. There were other problems but I just don't have a clue how to put it. I was quite surprised to say the least. I went a ways with it to see if I missed something and when machine started crashing into limits I had enough and went back to 3.042.020 and it looks like that cleared up the nasties. Any way I hope so !

8/02 EDIT Today I reloaded the .029 version and it seems sofar that I must have done something yesterday that messed it up, today it seems so far to be fine.

[Cruiser]

It turns out there really is a problem with version .029 ! so it is back to .020 for me for a while here is the link.
http://www.machsupport.com/forum/ind...c,12082.0.html