Yeah! that’s awesome, much more sense.
Can’t wait to hear about the 4th axis project, I have that and laser on my short-list for this fall, hoping to learn from your mistakes 
I am sure I will have some, it should be fun 
I am going with the ethernet solution…I’ll keep you posted.
I’ll get some pictures posted tomorrow…but yes, 3-jaw chuck.
where?
most info I found suggests it won’t work. But most ofthat info was
a few years old…
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You can’t just use a USB to parallel printer converter, it won’t work. Instead you need a USB adapter that has a suitable Mach3/4 driver i.e. Smoothstepper or UC-100
pff another piece of hardware to add to the tally and another 100+ bucks… And it doesn’t support Mach3-Lathe
I think I’ll just find me a scrapped PC with parallel port and be done with it.
An add on, PCI parallel port card will only set you back about $30. As long as it supports ECP/EPP, it will work fine with Mach 3 (or Linuxcnc)
Playing around a bit with the rotary axis…for this I simply swapped the Y-Axis connector for the rotary axis connector. I needed to adjust the mm per step also. I’ll be making a mount for the head and tail of the rotary axis so they simply bolt to the wasteboard holes.
Here is a quick v-carve on a dowel. Nothing spectacular, but a good start. This is still using grbl.
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Nicely done! great idea to swap A for Y as a Proof of Concept, can’t wait to see more.
I have far too many projects to tear apart my machine for things like this right now, so I’m going to be watching your progress intently, thanks for sharing !
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Thanks, the nice things is, I used 4 pin XLR connectors for the motors, so it only takes a few seconds to change everything back.
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I think there is a belt and pulleys on that box behind. You can play with them to find perfect movement with Y axis power without changing any steps on grbl. Mitsumi usa have calculation tool for it. I’m not familiar with but I’m sure you can figure that out.
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I justed wanted to make sure everything worked. I also did a small relief carve to run the rotary axis for about 30 minutes, everything worked great. Once my new electronics show up, I will be departing from grbl and going with the gecko g540 controller and Mach4.
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Here is the relief carving on the same dowel, again the steps are off so the buffalo is a little squashed, but I was just testing things out.
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Wow, very impressive. I can see this being used to make precision dowels, wands for Halloween, and a dozen more things.
Do you think there’s any way to trick Easel into doing this? Maybe “unrolling” the carve surface into a rectangle so it thinks the Y axis is moving instead of the rotary? It wouldn’t be able to spin all the way around so it would take longer, but maybe it would work…
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Right now the way I am doing this, grbl thinks I have a regular 3 axis machine. You would have to adjust the steps per mm for the Y-Axis and do a mirrored image; the Y movement on the rotary makes the carving backwards. For the text, I had to design it mirrored for it to come out correctly.
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Easel can do the flip and rotate no problem. Now I’m REALLY interested in this, can’t wait to see what you make with it.
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Probably, but since I am changing electronics I won’t go that route.
man I check in on your thread every so often and you have some cool stuff going I took the pluge and bought a 4x8 machine but I am looking at a 4th axis like yours also
here is a pic of my new machine
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Wow, that is a beast!