Newbie success - foam cutter

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20 Apr 2015 18:47 #57932 by chris_gough
I finally got round to converting my home made foam cutter to LinuxCNC. I don't know why I procrastinated for so long, it wasn't difficult once I tracked down the specs for my hardware - after a false start about 6 months ago, in the end it only took a few evenings from first install to cutting my first piece of foam. Thanks for the great software!

The roadblock was the (obscure) HobbyCNC PRO Rev 1 Driver board, which is similar to the 4 axis chopper except for the following pins:
* 10, timer (not limit)
* 11, heat feedback (not A home)
* 12, auto/manual heat control (not X home)
* 13, NC (not Y home)
* 15, NC (not Z home)
* 16, heat

Once I worked that out (well, emailed HobbyCNC and got a quick reply from Dave) I was away.

I still have a lot of changes that I'd like to make - for example, I'm controlling heat manually at the moment (the board supports DC wire heat but I only have a convenient AC supply of the right voltage). I also don't have limit switches yet - the board doesn't support them, so I've ordered another parallel card and will figure that out when it arrives. I also think I'll convert it to BeagleBoneBlack+cape at some stage, because I only managed to get the jitter down to just under 75,000 and I don't enjoy the fan-whine from my old computer.

My config lives here github.com/monkeypants/foamcutter/, I've got a few questions but I'll try to post them in other more appropriate parts of the forum.
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20 Apr 2015 18:50 #57933 by chris_gough
Ah FFS, that picture wasn't upside down when I sent it.

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11 Apr 2016 13:00 #73098 by Fastest1
I know this thread is older but what do you mean the Hobby CNC Pro doesnt support limit switches?
Mine works quite well with them.
Or do you mean you have no more I/O's with a single parallel port?

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11 Apr 2016 20:44 #73133 by chris_gough
My mistake, the board apparently does support limit switches (but not enough IOs).

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12 Apr 2016 09:35 - 12 Apr 2016 09:35 #73148 by cncbasher
you can connect all your limit switches to one pin , they dont need to be seperate
connect them all in series , and use nc contacts
Last edit: 12 Apr 2016 09:35 by cncbasher.

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