Thank you for your response. The driver boards I was talking about do not have any logic. It’s purely wire routing. 4 wires from the old control board go into a little board in the motor enclosure (actually 4+2 out of the old controller, the other two being for the limit switch). 8 wires come out and go to the motor. No other components on the board. I just mentioned it as part of why I was trying a standalone stepper without anything else attached for the sake of eliminating variables.
Just to be clear, I was somewhat hyperbolizing when I said that “you just program it and it works”, though that is very much how it’s shown in numerous youtube videos, when any programming is shown at all. I share now what follows just for a view of what this experience has been like for me. Having worked with many developers as a project manager I know that developers see things very differently from how users see them. I hope the perspective helps a little.
There’s no doubt that it can be made to work. I am frustrated (not with you, just with the experience) because, when I asked around about recommendations for driving this old machine over USB or ethernet, many people recommended various forms of gShield/TinyG/G2. I expressed that I wasn’t interested in the additional learning curve of an Arduino system if I could avoid it, as I already have plenty to learn with the entire CAM/gcode/CNC workflow, etc., but I was repeatedly assured that it’s just no big deal, you just load the preassembled firmware and run with it. What I saw on YouTube videos certainly seemed to confirm that, and then in my searching I found John’s blog post comparing grbl, TinyG, and G2, and found his arguments there quite compelling, so that’s what I ordered.
As it turns out my first instinct was correct. It’s just not that simple. Now I’m out a chunk of change, all the time waiting for the boards to arrive, and the time spent trying to figure out how to make these work. Just so I could avoid having a big tower in my crowded single car shop. I have a full complement of metalworking and woodworking equipment there, so there’s just not room for anything more than necessary. This seemed like the perfect solution. But it has proven to be more of a PITA than just getting a Gecko and using an old tower and Mach3 would have been. The time this has taken has cost me more than it would have for the Geckodrive G540, BOB, and Mach3 license. Of course I would be stuck with Mach3 on ancient hardware, but at least I would have a working machine instead of just questioning looks from my concerned wife.
For now take it as feedback that the workflow is not clear for new users. I am a hobby machinist, I have worked as a project manager in a $20M software firm, I have set up complex systems of many types including combined Linux and OSX networks for ripping and printing (including the most complex color management system I have ever heard of) in a large format print shop, and I generally know my way around computers and machines. I certainly consider my skillset sufficient for this kind of project (setting up, not developing) but I find the scattered information thoroughly frustrating. I have a very limited amount of time to spend on this a few evenings per week and I end up forgetting much of what I’ve learned by the time I get back to it. The documentation leaves much to be desired for those outside the development community. For instance, at no point in my pre-purchase research did I get the feeling that the G2 “is still very much under development”. A now 2 year old blog post promoting it as the best solution in this category certainly didn’t suggest anything remotely like that. http://chilipeppr2.blogspot.com/2015/
I think I would find this “read everything on site X and then compare it with everything on site Y, and some blend of the two is what you need here” approach to be perfectly reasonable for a roll-your-own-controller system. But I was under the impression (again, pre-purchase) that I was buying a commercial product that was ready for primetime.
Again, just feedback to be applied if considered useful. Sorry if it sounds like pure complaint. I really do mean to help for the sake of others in the future. Thanks again for your detailed response, and I will go over those pages again to try to put together what I’ve missed.
