Post by millton on May 22, 2019 15:10:54 GMT
My company recently purchased a Power Route kit. While it is pretty well built mechanically (although the kit was missing a few pieces and the instructions were some of the worst I've ever seen on a kit...ever hear of labeling your pictures or having a diagram or two rather than random close-ups of assemblies with no context?), the electronics are definitely the Achilles' heel and really reduce the machine's performance. Using a constant acceleration control scheme (i.e. 3-rd order/GRBL) on a machine of that cost/capability is really holding it back and reducing cut quality in my opinion, as someone used to the smoothness of constant jerk motion planning (4-th order). There are embedded open source control options that use constant jerk calculations such as the TinyG. While that still doesn't support things like canned cycles (nor does GRBL), I think surface finish on metals would benefit greatly from it, and the machine would run much more smoothly rather than sounding like a coffee can full of rocks as it slams around while changing directions abruptly. A lot of engineers I work with have been impressed by the machine itself and then raised an eyebrow at the crude control electronics.
My question, then, is have you tested any alternate step generation hardware that can be integrated with the existing stepper drivers, or should I just scrap the whole thing and assemble my own controller?
