I have the 4848 Pro but installed the Centroid Acorn with Clearpath Servos. Would it be acceptable to have an area for this topic??
We make a modular design machine so that users can modify them to suit heir needs.
So yes! Tell me about your Centroid conversion. There are a lot of users that have done this. I’d be interested too hear how you like it. Did you switch from Mach?
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When I built my Avid PRO4848 earlier this year I decided not to use the Avid stepper motors and electronics package. Instead I used CNC4PC’s C25XP which is a combination of a breakout board and SmoothStepper and four Teknic Clearpath servo motors (CPM-3421S-ELN).
While it did take some work on my part to integrate all the components together, I was able to do it for less than the Avid package. The performance has been great. After tuning the servos I am able to operate at an acceleration setting of 100 with no noticeable jerkiness that is common with stepper motors. While I usually cut at much lower feed rates this system easily supports cuts in the 400-600 IPM range. An added benefit is the Precision Hard Stop Homing Clearpath functionality which saves the cost of the Avid sensor package normally used for homing and gives a very dependable accurate homing position every time. It was fairly easy to use the Avid version of Mach 4 and the 4HP Spindle package with this setup. Is your experience with the Centroid Acorn instead of a SmoothStepper similar?
I used cl86y with nema 34s at 110vdc with acorn and it was quite straightforward to get set up. The only thing was that the acorn gantry squaring is pretty meh and the display during operation is meh. It’s also a bit fiddly to customize. Otherwise it’s a rock solid platform. I do like that acorn has s curve options which helps at high accels - it lets me run at 2m/s on x and y, and 3 on z with 40m/min rapids before the flex gets too excessive from the frame… although I have a custom bed so that might help too.
I am using the Centroid Acorn board with CNC12 with Clearpath Nema34 Servos. I have liked the setup well but have not setup a squaring setup beside physically holding the gantry square when hitting the home setup. I am using the 4th axis for the Y pairing which has been limiting on step with the Acorn. But now Centroid is in Beta with an Acorn6 with 6 axis. I plan on giving that a try. It’s been 5 years since my setup so it will have to be a lot of studying to get back up to speed to do the job.
On my old Centroid setup (one I had on another machine) I wrote my own squaring routine. The one that’s build in to Centroid works, but the logic isn’t the best for router tables.
Acorn 6 looks really interesting. There’s a lot of IO in it. The board is really a lot bigger than Acorn 4 though.
How’s your setup held up over the years? reliable? And what did you switch from and why?