Board suggestions for 4-axes setup

Mostly Printed CNC - MPCNC Advice
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Hi community,

at first of course thank you Ryan for all your work and effort you put into that! Just wow!

I’m progressing on building my own MPCNC however a colleague needs some advice on what board to use.
If he uses dual endstops it requires 6 steppers but most boards only offer 5 stepper ports.
So is there a good way to get 6 steppers working to use a 4th axis?

Currently he already owns the following what only allows using 4 stepper motors:

  • Arduino UNO Rev.3 board
  • A4988 driver on a CNC Shield Expansion Board for Arduino

Is there a way to expand that setup? Maybe connect a second CNC shield?

Thanks and regards,

Brian

1 Like
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For dual endstops, you only need 5 steppers, 2 for the X axis, 2 for the Y axis, and 1 for the Z axis. I haven’t delved into the capabilities of the uno or the CNC shield, but it would probably take some effort to make it work since the uno only has a limited number of I/O pins.

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I know that it requires 5 steppers for dual endstops. That was not the question.
If you use dual endstops and want to use a 4th axes it requires 6 steppers in total.

The question is how to drive those 6 steppers and is the already available hardware expandable for that goal/purpose?

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Most unplug the X or Y axis to use it on the rotary since you won’t need it.

If you do need extra drivers most boards have a few extra broken out that you can manually wire in extra drivers.