Possible Purchase of PM-25MV

mcdanlj said:
I think only the people who use their mills remove it.

After it is removed, there are some convenient already-tapped holes you can use for attaching coolant lines, lights, etc.
Click to expand...
It also very conveniently holds the button to control a pneumatic draw bar.

ieMkdQe.jpg
 
I've been using my mill now for a couple of weeks and I think I'm about ready to start thinking about the CNC conversion.

I think I want to start from the top and work down meaning that I want to get the motherboard first, then add the parallel port, then the BoB, then the motors and drivers. Next, I'll install LinuxCNC and configure it. After I get all this working, I'll work on the ballscrews, mounting, etc. This will keep my mill downtime to a minimum.

So, can anyone recommend a motherboard/CPU? I ran the live version of LinuxCNC on my main PC and got great numbers for the latency test (~2000). However, on my older PC, the numbers were not so great. So, I think a newer, cheaper MB is in order.

Also, I've been looking at the Mesa cards for motion control. Are they worth it? If so, which model?

Thanks!
 
After some searching and reading, I think I might go with this mini-ITX motherboard: ASRock Mini ITX DDR3 1066 Q1900B-ITX. It has included CPU (Intel J1900), Ethernet, USB ports, parallel port, 2 serial ports, HDMI port, SATA ports, and PCI Express port. I found this in a LinuxCNC forum. I just need to add memory and power supply.

Anyone thoughts on this? are there better/cheaper alternatives?

Does it make sense to put this in a traditional case and add a separate box for the BoB and motor drivers? Or, try to place everything in one box?

Thanks. Any input would appreciated.
 
So you're building the PC you'll use on this machine rather than just using an older one you already have?

What I did was add a parallel card to my old Dell for the cheap 5 axis controller card I'm using currently. My sense is that the PC isn't likely to be a bottleneck for this application until I'm pretty far down the road (I'm also using LinuxCNC).

I have a Mesa 7I96 controller that will go into my new controls box with bigger DM542 stepper drives (up from TB6600's) and upgrading to 425oz steppers. I'll also be switching over to Ethernet for communications so no need for a parallel port anymore. I'm running a low-end Dell NUC that I have right now for testing, I'm not sure this one is what I'll ultimately use but I like the form factor as the mini-tower I have now seems larger than I need.

Honestly, I would approach the controls build from the other direction and pick your steppers/servo's first. If I knew what I do now when I started I'd have gone with different stuff but in my case I was building the whole machine so keeping this part cheap was important. I also got some steppers from another forum member that work pretty good until I push them hard.

Swapping in a different PC is pretty simple compared to changing the stuff closer to the machine. I can understand the logic of going with a set-up that others have had success with, and the motherboard you're looking at is pretty cheap so not a huge deal. But, if you have a PC that you can use to get started with I doubt you're going to run into latency issues for quite a while. Getting everything talking and moving things around is a challenge in the beginning but as you get more familiar with LinuxCNC it's less of in issue to do it again.

Others may know better than me but coming from a computer support perspective I just cringe at building a new system with a built-in older (slower) processor unless you know that's the only thing that will work.


Cheers,

1ohn
 
Yeah, my old PC didn't give very good latency numbers when I ran the test from the live boot. So, I'm thinking of getting a newer, smaller, cheap MB for this. This MB has a parallel port built in. At around $80, it's pretty cheap. A lot of people seem to be using this MB for LinuxCNC based on the reviews on Amazon and the LinuxCNC forum. So, it must be decent for this task.

My thinking is to go from the top down to get everything I can working before dismantling the mill. This will keep the mill down for the shortest amount of time and allow me to possibly mill the mounting hardware I need.

I'll probably go with what shooter123456 used as far as stepper motors and motor drivers. So, these are already picked.

I wasn't planning on using a Mesa motion controller unless needed.

However, I guess the other option is to keep my older, slower PC and use a Mesa card. From what I've gathered, using a Mesa card requires minimal latency numbers?
 
Okay, I found an old Lenovo Thinkpad at work with an Intel i5-3470T CPU running at 2.9 GHz and 16 GB of memory. I'm going to try an run the latency test on this.

If successful, I 'll need a Mesa 7I96 card connected to the Ethernet since there is no parallel port? I'm assuming this is better than putting together a new PC?
 
devils4ever said:
Okay, I found an old Lenovo Thinkpad at work with an Intel i5-3470T CPU running at 2.9 GHz and 16 GB of memory. I'm going to try an run the latency test on this.

If successful, I 'll need a Mesa 7I96 card connected to the Ethernet since there is no parallel port? I'm assuming this is better than putting together a new PC?
Click to expand...

I don't have my new panel hooked up yet so if you have questions about the Mesa board please give them a call. From my research I decided to go this direction but there are a whole lot of options out there for control boards. I definitely think it's worthwhile to give the thinkpad a try, if it doesn't work there's always the building a new PC route.

Cheers,

1ohn
 
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