Hey Guys, I’ve got to get a BOB to go with that smooth Stepper

General CNC CNC Routers
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Hey Guys,

I’ve got to get a BOB to go with that smooth Stepper for my new machine. I have an old cheap one I bought about a year and a half ago, but I doubt it’s the capacity I’ll need. Do y’all know if there is much difference between say the Stepper online model and the Gecko G240? I think the G240 is a combo of the BOB & drivers (it’s like $250), whereas the other is like $70. I think they are both 4MHz. Do y’all have any idea what the main criteria to look for is? I purchased a DMT542 driver for my Nema 34 and some TB6600 drivers for my other motors, but I want to be sure I have enough power for the Steppers. I bought the ESS smooth Stepper for the machine and have 2 425 Oz-in Nema 23s running the table (Y axis). I was also looking at a BOB by CNC4U which has the potential to run 6 axes, if needed. It’s a little more than the Stepper online model, but not as much as gecko. Have y’all ever heard of any of these, or have suggestions?

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A smooth Stepper is a BOB for Mach 3. Call it a BOB+ if you will? Mach 3 is such garbage it needs a translation hardware interface to generate a decent pulse stream. That’s where Smooth Stepper comes in. A brilliantly inelegant solution if I do say so myself. The “Smooth” in Smooth Stepper implies that Mach itself is not terribly smooth on its own. Which is pretty much the truth. But no one is claiming that Windows is a Real Time OS. Microsoft is fixing to release their first Linux distribution. So there’s hope for them yet. https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/microsoft-azure-sphere-iot-linux.html