Is the IONI driver from Granite Devices - https://granitedevices.com/miniature-servo-drive-ioni - even remotely relevant to the smoothieboard? I am such a noob I have no idea, hence the question.
Not even remotely. Unless you had the know how to create an adapter board for it.
Well there you have it. I have all the know-how for creating an adaptor board for my ironing board, mainly to hold the iron on the other side as well. That probably won’t translate to the smoothieboard. I’m just guessing, of course.
It has a step/direction interface; it COULD work with the smoothieboard for sure. It would just need adapter hardware. The smoothie breaks out the pins for this, you’d just have to do some custom work. It’s certainly not a plug and play thing; no external board is.
I can’t tell for sure yet, but the IONICUBE seems to act as a backplane for 4 drivers, and it looks like it can take the S/D signals that way. And it’s 150UKP for the backplane and at least 150UKP (and up!) for each driver board, then there’s the motors and encoders. There’s ways to make servos work with smoothieboard but there’s no tutorial for that yet. It’s not a newbie project.
Oh it’s a bit pricey, alright. Just ocurred to me that for bigger printers it might be a solution, or perhaps for greater speed and accuracy.
That system does look pretty attractive in many ways. There’s a simpler, more self-contained system I hope to hook up and install soon.
@Dani_Epstein Its actually very easy to drive servo motors using the smoothieboard! As long as the servodriver has a pulse/direction interface.
I’ve tested that with an industrial servo driver a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM838mYFjcA
Oh well, things are beginning to look interesting now. Jeff, you are making me quite curious. Bouni, very interesting blog (most of it way over my head) but clearly all this sort of thing looks quite plausible after all. I feel marginally less stupid.