I’ve got a question about using the jackpot board to power external steppers. I want to use a jackpot board to retrofit a previous CNC that was running on mach 3. I’m thinking I can just plug the drivers into the jackpot board, give configuration, and move right along.
Will that work? I saw an “external driver breakout” board on tindie: External Stepper Motor Driver Adapter from Bart Dring on Tindie
Can I use that?
It looks as if it should work. At 2 dollars a piece it‘s not too much of an investment to try.
wait, does the jackpot have the external screw terminals that Barts does? If not that 2 dollar item will not help you.
It does not have the screw terminals, but I’m assuming I can just connect to the pins in the same way? The signals will be the same? Would I be better off just getting 6x CNC Controller for FluidNC from Bart Dring on Tindie?
I was thinking the jackpot represented the latest and greatest evolution of the form, so that’s the one to get, but I just want a good fluidnc board that can support external drivers.
Direction step and enable are broken out, I don’t think you need anything other than that from the board. That should be fine, unless you need something else.
I did some cutting this weekend with WebUI3. The good news is it was pretty uneventful. Things seem to work as expected. The jog buttons are a nice size so you don’t have to zoom in to prevent fat-fingering. There is a home-all button on the jogging section that will home X and Y which is nice. The one thing I could not find is a resume button. My G-code pauses to attach and then remove the touch plate and I had to send a “~” command to resume. I did have my Z do some strange things. There are only one set of coordinates displayed on the screen and I am not sure if they are machine or workspace coordinates. My Gcode moves up to z=20 to attach the touch plate. One time this caused it to go up too far and one time it sank into my spoilboard. I think I need to change this to a relative move instead of absolute. In the old interface I could tell where I was in Z before running a job and I don’t remember ever having my Z be off by 20 or 30mm like it was in this case. Maybe it is not zeroing on startup? I still haven’t figured out (or looked into) the macro’s. Can anyone point me to a link of how the macros are implemented?
Post a screenshot or picture of your display.
Something doesn’t sound right.
I’m guessing you don’t have polling configured or something. The Jog Panel should show you both machine coordinates and workspace coordinates.
The status panel has pause and resume buttons when a job is running
Here is a screenshot of the display right after I started the job and it is waiting for me to attach the probe. Before this I homed x and y. There are still ? On the coordinates and only one set of coordinates. In the status section there is a pause button, but it only sens the ! Not the ~ to resume.
You need to go to the settings and enable polling commands.
Change the command text to be only ‘?’
This is similar to V2 where you had to select the radio to pick an update time.
Currently, yours is set not to give updates
Wow, you will probably finf this funny, but I didnt see the interface settings page before. Amazing. I enabled poling, and changed the command to ?, but it is giving me a flag. Any ideas?
Nevermind, I had not saved it. I need to spend some time on this. This is a huge improvement over the previous version
I’ve been bit by that myself… that’s what the flag means- changes are not saved.
Thanks, that did the trick.
