Hi folks. We’re considering fitting Smoothieboard to an older but mechanically good laser cutter. However, the lasercutter has DC motors with encoders on X and Y axis, so doesn’t work directly with Smoothieboard per se.
Is there an option to have Smoothieboard work with DC motors and encoders? I did notice a page about the Smoothiedriver, but don’t see where that project came to fruition.
Thanks for any info, Graham
Imported from wikidot
Hey.
Smoothiedriver is in an indefinite pause.
To control your motors, you’d need “servo” drivers that take step/dir pulses. Those exist, but are extremely expensive.
Most likely it’d be much cheaper just to replace the motors with steppers.
Cheers.
Thanks Arthur for the speedy reply!
Do you know what kind of encoders it uses?
There is a library for arduino called dcservo made by misan that allows you to interface a DC motor and encoder to a stepper based system. As long as the encoder is supported all you would need is an arduino and an control chip (H-bridge for DC / ESC for BLDC) for each X and Y. If it is a simple optical encoder you should be fine. If it is some sort of chip based encoder, right now only the AMS chips with I2C are supported.
I would link to the project but my account is brand new so I cannot post links. You can find it on github pretty easy though.