First off, I am relatively new to the CNC world. I built a MPCNC running on Rambo board with Marlin software that came with the kit. I am in the process of building a lowrider and I would like to use a tangential knife. It is my understanding that it has not been worked out yet for a ramps/marlin platform. The fourth axis for turning the tangential knife is hooked up to the extruder port on the board but there are some checks on the firmware for the extruder that cause problems. Is this correct?
I have been looking at running my Lowrider with Mach3 but I am a bit confused how this works. I want to use a windows 10 tablet to run the CNC, but I can’t figure out which board I would need. Unlike, the marlin/ramps setup it seems Mach 3 does all of the processing of the gc0de into stepper signals on the PC and this information is then sent to a stepper driver board? On the Marlin/Ramps the processing is done on an internal processor on the ramps board it self?
Do I need a Mach 3 interface board in addition to a stepper driver board?
Can you direct me to a board/boards that I would need to wire up my Lowrider to use MACH3?
I also can’t comment on mach3, but I would suggest looking into LinuxCNC and grbl solutions too. I can’t stand the idea of windows running my CNC machine, but that might just be me.
No one had done that yet, although I believe the software could be written. It’s not for the faint of heart.
You would need a dedicated PC, but something like a raspberry pi works fine with it. CNC.js (v1pi) or printrun (and the command line interface) come to mind.
It uses similar CAM to Marlin, you would just select the grbl post processor. There are not many differences in the gcode itself, so I even ran the Marlin gcode on my grbl board for a while. I don’t have grbl anymore though. Now, CAM for a tangential cutter is a different deal though.
I would start with trying to make sure you can:
actually do the 4th axis with grbl. I’m pretty sure you can, but I haven’t done it myself and
Figure out how to CAM the 4th axis. Hopefully that CAM program has the ability to write something grbl can use.
I am currently building a Mach3 version and several others have. Definitely a more expensive option. The only reason I am, is I have a sherline mill that runs from Mach3 and I would like to have everything the same.
Desktop or Laptop, Mach3 or 4 software, PoKeys57CNC Motion Controller, power supply and a driver for each axis.
Unless you have a specific need for Mach, I would go with the printer electronics version.
The CNC I worked on that had mach3 used a smoothstepper ethernet to get the commands from mach3, and then that connected to a Gecko g540 to drive the steppers.
I’ve considered switching to this on my next CNC machine too.
Mach 3 uses the parallel port, or the very popular Ethernet smoothstepper. I highly advise against a USB to parallel port converter for this use. If you want to use the windows tablet, I recommend using it as like a vnc viewer for the PC actually running Mach.
While quite old, Mach is fairly good, but setting up the motors and acceleration is a bit more involved than letting a grbl or Marlin board control the motors. There is a grbl gcode sender/cam application that tries to replicate Mach 3 functionality, it’s called bCNC.
My favorite thing about my grbl/Marlin machines is that they run off a raspberry pi that boots really quick, and is only around 30-40 USD. They also don’t really depend on a computer to calculate speeds and accelerations, the computer simple sends text gcode commands.