The y axis moves fine when jogging (now that I found how to reverse one of the motors) but the x an z have some problems. Im running the latest master of linux cnc 2.9 on Debian stretch After much tweaking and searching for settings online I was able to finally get some motion but there seems to be major issues. I purchased a z axis already complete with floating head and breakaway.
Ok so I have my base machine now set up, I have the mesa 7i96 with thcad 10, for drivers I have leadshine dm556t. I have built 8 table and buy a kit with the Motors (1 nema 34 and 2 nema 23, 2 power supplies, and the drivers for those motors). You should be using one that has “Blowback” type start for the plasma sequence, Hi Freq of Hi Voltage are not good for CNC work.
The connection to the plasma unit is made with a plug on the back of the unit, if you Everlast are fairly new it should have one and the manual will show it. I do use direct drive for a lead screw on the Z axis, with a 10 turn per inch lead screw. Attached is the way I do the reduction for a rack and gear drive a belt drive is used from the motor to a secondary shaft with the gear mounted. Rodw is correct with no direct drive but ones that had reduction built in.
There is member who have built their own table and have post construction details. Different drive, electronics and controller are some of the differences. The are many excellent ways to built a table that will give years of service, do your research a settle on a design you like.
I get excellent performance from Longs Motor DM542a drives off eBay driving NEMA 23 and small NEMA 34's up to 21 metres per minute using Mesa hardware running Linuxcnc and Plasmac.
So using Leadshine or Longs Motor drives will be the ticket.
The high performance THC is managed within the LinuxCNC PC itself.īecause you will not be using a parallel port breakout board, the Gecko 540 is not a good choice. Should you go this way, I'd suggest that you look at the ethernet Mesa 7i96 ($119) and a Mesa THCAD card ($69). It is vastly superior than any external THC can ever hope to be becasue torch height is being managed right inside the motion controller resulting in a superior design. Before you make a decision on hardware, have a look at the Plasmac config which is now part of the Linuxcnc distribution for V 2.8 and up.
rimer.htmlīy the sound of it, coming from Grbl, you are not really wedded to the Windows platform. There is a Plasma primer document as part of linuxcnc which you may find helpful regardless of your chosen platform. You need about 25mm travel per motor revolution and you will be up over 90mm per revolution. If you are accurate, there is no need for a spring loaded pinion. I would not recommend a direct drive rack and pinion.