Thinking about a 5i25 board only

PCW wrote: This is pretty typical of step motors driven past their torque limits

This why I asked about the lead pitch and step drive ustep ratio
( To see if the parallel port step rate is likely to a limiting factor )

also what is you power supply voltage?

The lead pitch is 4mm/rev and the screws are ball screws, not Acme. The supply is 24V. I have is set for 1/8 steps. It seems as though there is plenty of torque to drive it. It will absolutely break off a 1/4" end mill if I bury it.

55mm/sec is a 3300 mm/minute speed! Why would you wana go any faster on that ???
Never mind.
I would suggest you set the microsteping at 1/2 or at 1/1, that way you get a bit more vibration, but quite some more torque, and theoretically 8 times more speed.
Tom

Ya, know what, You are right. I set the step rate to 50nS and that worked just fine, but it only boosted the speed to 65mm/S (actually 67.62). So I reset it back to 1000nS and 55mm/S and I will just use it that way. It's really only the G00 moves that are affected anyhow. It really can run for hours without missing steps or whatever.

I have enough spare parts to build a whole box just like the one that came with the machine, maybe a little better. I guess I am just going to go with what I have and use those parts to build a 3D printer. :laugh:

Thanks for the input. It's been very helpful. I did not really know how what my expectations ought to be.

You are more than welcomed, always.
I tend to test the c...p out of the machines i build and push them far beyond what they are supposed to handle, but when i install them at an actual working place, i tend not to go even near those speeds ( example, www.facebook.com/tomacnc check the first post, the red plasma cutter, it can do easily 36 meters a minute as i made it very light, the whole moving gantry is 12 KG, but i left it at 7.2 meters/minute. During use it will never be used above 3m/min).
Regards,
Tom

Thanks! Nice machines. I "liked" the FB page.

I had thought of building a plasma table, but I think I will get more use out of a 3D printer. I want to do aluminum castings and I will use the printer to make positives.

For what it's worth, I bought some of these . I tried them out and they work great for 2A motors.

I turned up all of the parameters in stepconfig to be as fast as they will go for the max latency that I have and it still seems to work just fine. I can probably benefit from getting something like a mesa 7i92. As I said earlier, it probably does not matter if I make the machine go faster, but being able to get rid of the parallel port would be a big plus.