When Dean Gouramanis and I started tinkering with Power Peg technology, we talked about developing a module that could plug into a mother board. Why would
you do that? Well, I can think of a few reasons.
First of, depending on which CNC machine you are building, the amount of drivers will be different. For example a CNC Plasma Cutter can be built with two
or three stepper drivers depending on whether you use a single stepper for the X axis or a matched pair. A CNC Router will undoubtedly require three stepper drivers and if you want a rotary adapter, you will
need four. So why buy a board with 4 stepper drivers if you may do fine with two or three? Add them as you need them, right?
On the other hand, which driver you use is also tied to the axis in question. For example, you may want to use high current for X and Y axis but not as
much for Z or A. The machine will have the last word, so wouldn’t it be nice if you could mix and match which driver to use on a per axis basis?
Well chances are you can do today. There are many driver solutions out there and you can easily wire them up to your parallel access
card and VOILA, CNC here we go. Two keywords there: wire and parallel access card. Boy! Isn’t wiring those modules into the parallel breakout board a little bit of a pain? Well, no more! Behold the CNC
Mother Board:
|