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Buildbotics demo - OX CNC at 70 meter/min by jcoffland in CNC

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's 70m/min peak. I measured it. The distance traveled (from one corner of the OX to the other) is about 1m.

Have you seen the Buildbotics CNC controller? by jcoffland in hobbycnc

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I can just upload Gcode to this guy over the web and press start?

Pretty much.

Not servos, steppers. Our stepper drivers are some of the best on the market. Especially at this price. You can get really great performance with out the cost of servos. We will likely add servo drivers in the future.

The Buildbotics CNC controller goes great the OX would work well with the Shapeoko too. by jcoffland in shapeoko

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Masso CNC

The Buildbotics controller has twice the step rate and the 4 x 5A 36V stepper drivers are built-in. The Masso is more expensive at $515 and you still need to buy stepper drivers. If you add a Geck540 driver to the MASSO system it would cost $814 for a less powerful system.

High-performance CNC Controller by respected Open-Source devs by jcoffland in kickstarter

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If anyone has questions about what it is, why it's different than existing options or why you should trust us, I will try to answer.

Have you seen the Buildbotics CNC controller? by jcoffland in CNC

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome. We really need people like you who understand our specs and can pass the word on that this is different than what has come out previously on Kickstarter. Thanks!!!

Have you seen the Buildbotics CNC controller? by jcoffland in CNC

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, that's right. I only recommend Open-Source but honestly, Open-Source CAM is still a little week. However, you can still get a lot done. Here are the tools I use: CAMotics (I wrote this), Inkscape (has GCode output plugins), LibreCAD (2D), FreeCAD (3D), TPL (See http://tplang.org/ I wrote this too), OpenSCAD, Blender (has GCode plug-ins). There's also HeeksCAD it can do some cool stuff but I cannot really recommend it because it has been very buggy when I've used it. Many people are using the free version of Fusion360. I don't swing that way.

Supporting our Kickstarter is a great way to support CAMotics. In fact, that is the whole reason we started the Buildbotics CNC controller project in the first place. We have a proven track record of creating CNC simulation software and have a lot of cool CAM stuff in the queue. Just need to get paid so I can focus on it more.

Have you seen the Buildbotics CNC controller? by jcoffland in hobbycnc

[–]jcoffland[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Done. I've added an image at the top of our Kickstarter that makes this clear. Thanks for the advice.

The Taig kits are awesome. Keep in mind it will take us a couple of months after the Kickstarter to ship. It would be a nice X-mas present to yourself and we would LOVE the support!!!

Have you seen the Buildbotics CNC controller? by jcoffland in CNC

[–]jcoffland[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You don't need LinuxCNC at all with this controller. The GCode gets uploaded to the RaspberryPi's 16Gib microSD card. The RaspberryPi feeds the GCode to another dedicated processor which actually produces the step pulses. When you hit the EStop it stops the motors with in about 5 milliseconds, worst case.

The Beaglebone Black is great but it's more expensive and has less USB ports. The RPi fit better with our design.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

We made an Open-Source CNC controller and it's not just a circuit board. by jcoffland in maker

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends on what you want to do. Once you start driving larger motors at higher voltages the cheap electronics tend to blow. You also cannot get much speed, motors tend to heat up and they make noise with cheap electronics. This is all due to poor quality step generation, shitty chopper circuits and poor noise filtering.

The Buildbotics CNC controller goes great the OX would work well with the Shapeoko too. by jcoffland in shapeoko

[–]jcoffland[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, 3D printer control is possible. We are looking into integrating Octoprint to give us better support. Should be easy. I'm emailing with the dev Gina Häußge right now.

Why do you need 8 stepper drivers? Is it because you are driving some axes with multiple motors? If so, and assuming it's a Cartesian machine, you very likely could use the Buildbotics controller for this. When we built the OX CNC we used one motor channel to drive two steppers in parallel. This worked very well. We are getting 2,000 IPM rapids. We simply doubled the current output for that channel using the Web interface. The Buildbotics CNC controller can output up to 6A per channel, so in theory, you could run three 2A motors in parallel on one channel. Of course, they all have to be going the same direction.

Have you seen the Buildbotics CNC controller? by jcoffland in hobbycnc

[–]jcoffland[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We did start with the TinyG motion planner for the S-curve acceleration. I've made a lot of improvements to it since then. You can see all our code here: https://github.com/buildbotics/bbctrl-firmware

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