With the Easy-CNC board and some encoders can we make the PHP a closed loop unit? This would enable the machine to know when a step was missed correct?

Matthew

 

Matthew, This is an interesting idea. I am not totally sure, but I think that since our Easy-CNC boards are for steppers only, there is no way to take an input back from encoders into the board. You may be able to send the encoder data to a separate board and then pass that info to the Mach3 or EMC controller software though. If you could do this then you would essentially create a servo system. Not sure if this would be cheaper than just going with a servo system from the get go or not though.

 

yep. would be great.

a colleague of mine had the same idea as someone on this forum : use a ball mouse encoder from an old generation rodent...

not sure it can keep up with the speed of 1.5 though.

 

Hmmm....I'll look into it. I've got my eye on some 208oz dual shaft steppers and I'm looking at some magnetic encoders that go over the shafts. Now I just need to find the intermediary board to pass the info from the encoders to Mach3....

 

The problem with the mouse encoder is it's not granular enough. I think we need something that can read 2880 (360 degrees broken into 1/8ths) steps resolution....I think the mouse encoder is 180 steps.

 

I had posted something along this line, using the mouse encoder as an encoder mounted on the stepper, but someone said it wouldn't work but I didn't understand why. I had thought about the mouse encoder resolution problem. Can it not be geared up? Than one turn on the stepper will be, lets say, twenty turns on the encoder. The shaft on the mouse is so thin, almost anything that will be connected to the stepper will give a high ratio. It will not be a big thing and will mount easily on the back of the stepper, with a rubber wheel to turn the encoder shaft. A little more tricky, I guess, if the stepper doesn't have a double shaft, but not too much of a problem.

Yoram