Attach an extruder kit to my cnc milling?

Hello!

I'm looking for all the possible info in order to attach an extuder kit to my CNC milling machine. Does anybody do it? Any idea?

Thank you all,

Toni

Hi Toni

A number of people have done it. Sort of key question is how is your CnC mill controlled?

If it is attached to a parallel port on a PC then you can simply substitute a Sanguino for the PC.

If not then the next question is there a digital control interface I/O for your CnC software. You would need that to interface and control the extruder.

Hi Freds,

yes, actually I use the parallel port to communicate with the cnc machine. As you said, maybe I have to use a Sanguino controller, but now there's a DeskCNC controller board in my machine. This one can control through PWM and 6 more I/O that I actually do not use, so I think I could control the extruder head with it. I supose will have to own the extruder head controller board and communicate it to the DeskCNC controller board, but this is exactly what I don't know how to do.

Another question is about the sanguino: I don't know if I can substitute my actual controller board with the sanguino controller board in order to take control of all the machine, I mean to control the cnc milling machine and the extruder head.

Any light there?

Thank you,

Toni

Hi again,

as seen just now, I think it is impossible to interface and control the extruder with DeskCNC. So it means I have to use another controller motherboard for the machine. Maybe now this is not the correct place but, can arduino control as smooth as cnc controllers? with 3 real axis interpolation and full microsteping?

thank again

toni

I am doing a project with some high school kids for a pro light 1000 mill that is driven by a PCI controller board in the PC.

The mill has external I/O ports that are controlled via machine specific M g-codes which we are interfacing to our extruder controller.

We envision taking the Darwin g-code and running it though a translator to convert the extruder related M codes to our machine specific M codes to drive I/O lines to our extruder controller.

I am a little puzzled by your replies about the parallel port and then the controller board.

Is your mill running off of a standard PC parallel port and the control board is a supplemental I/O board for DeskCNC?

Here’s what I found for documentation for their controller, is this the controller that you have?

[www.deskcnc.com]

If so it looks like you could simply unplug your mill from this controller and plug it into like signal pins on a Sanguino.

In the latest G-Code the Sanguino does stepping via a software interrupt and can move all three axis in sync if needed. It is not going to drive your mill head as fast as the dedicated hardware that you have on this type of board, but unless your mills stages have extremely fine drive screws with high turns per inch ratio then the Sanguino should be able to keep up with the required step rate (note this is a SWAG=Silly wild ass guess).

If not then there is a flood pin and four aux pins (no G-code in docs for the aux pins, but tech support should know) that you could use for extruder controller interface lines, it does look like there is a single input via the touch probe pin which could be an extruder ready pin.

Convertingmy CNC Milling to RepStrap is what I am working on.

I made that CNC milling by myself, and it's controlled by EMC2 (linuxcnc.org). Parallel port is used to signal the stepper drivers and controlling the axis, as well as the spindle, end stops.

I am going to just add a extruder controller, and hook it up with USB->TTL cable. The EMC2 software will still take care of the G-Code and the logic and brings everything together.

EMC2 is much more powerful in terms of bringing different hardware together, as it has a powerful customizable logic system and hardware abstraction interface. I also have plan to replace the steppers with DC Motor + Encoder, EMC2 supports this upgrade path and provides the PID closed loop control logics.