EX Control with Stepper Video

1

I just got testing a loaner EX control system with my original stepper motors. The goal was to do a quick test before I switched ot the full servo system that I bought just so I could tell how much performance the controller and servos bring seperately.

I have to say the Acorn/CNC12 setup far exceeded my expectations. The motion is smoother in all cases compared to mach4, and in many cases much faster runtime (which I did not expect).

Thank you to AVID for loaning me the stepper controller version.
Now I’m on to my servo upgrade :slight_smile:

2

Thank you so much. Your video has answered most of my questions about a possible upgrade. I’m looking forward to see what you discover about the system with servos. In my particular case I’ve got a 3 HP spindle and NEMA 34 motors. Most of my work is with smaller bits so I don’t really need the new huge spindle. However, smoother/faster and no weird Mach 4 glitches would be awesome.

Thanks,
Garth

3

I’m new to this; what’s the rationale behind switching to EX?

4

Much smoother trajectory planner, less glitches, more features. I went over it in the video.

5

For what it’s worth I just ordered the EX upgrade because of this video. Thank you for making it.

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6

THANK YOU! We really appreciate it!

7

Jim’s video showing the actual difference between the two was super helpful. It is also nice to know I wasn’t the only one with random mach4 issues.

8

That is awesome!! I was wondering if you setup your spindle/vfd with this set-up or are you waiting for the servos and how well did that go?

9

Great Video

10

Ya, I ran a couple of jobs with the spindle when I had the Stepper version installed. It ran great.

I have now installed all my servo hardware in and its all working. Both the stepper and servo versions went very well. The servo takes a lot longer because there are more parts and wiring to do.

I’ve been spending more time this week trying to show the performance difference with the servos, but the stepper version was already great from a vibration perspective, so I’m probably not going to have a super quatative explanation about the stepper vs. servo right away. What I’m trying to do is speed up my cutting and maintain the low vibration I have, but that is proving to take longer than I thought because Centroid has a LOT of tunability and I have a lot to learn.
However, if you just run the settings that AVID has out of the box it will be smoother and faster than Mach4.

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11

Got it! Thanks Jim