Hi Peter,

There’s no end of stepper motors and motor drivers in various combinations.? And everyone will have an opinion on what is best so I’ll leave that to others.? On my Gingery Lathe I have these discontinued stepper drivers and a breakout board that goes to my Electronic Lead Screw which only requires a 1PPR spindle sensor.

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I was going to use a Beaglebone Black and this cape but support for MachineKit (LinuxCNC offshoot) dried up and the cape required normally open limit switches plus is discontinued too.? Here’s a link to a 6 year old video where the BeagleBone was used to run Z and Y axis of my mill.

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For the control system what can you buy that makes the least impact on your budget?? Not all laptops will work with LinuxCNC because of their internal battery saving approach.? For example battery voltage drops a bit so does the processor clock (to conserve power) and suddenly you have a response issue.

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I went a different direction for my playing on the bench and ultimately for one of my systems.

A Raspberry Pi4 4GB can always be repurposed for something like Home Assistant or any other projects.? Doesn’t go out of style as quickly as a laptop.? Keyboards, mice and monitors now often come for free.

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The break out boards come from China and run under $20 and have a standard parallel port interface connector and powered from USB or a 5V supply to isolate the Motor side from the processor.

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And finally the best and easiest way to use LinuxCNC is with the Mesa 7i92TF for example.? There are more extensive MESA products for larger CNC systems but other than the break out boards and the MESA everything else is recyclable and the MESA card can be resold.

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For the lathe the only other thing you will need is some sort of multi-line encoder on the lathe spindle to detect position and speed.?

John

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