Jedicut and Arduino over USB
Posté : ven. sept. 07, 2012 12:40 pm
Hi again,
now starting with the basics. The purpose of the new jedicut plugin USBSerial is to use jedicut on PC's and Laptops without a parallel Interface, which is nowadays more and more the case. But all PC's have a USB-interface which can be used.
A second target was to do the timing for the stepper motors and a possible PWM Modulation for the wire heating not on the PC because of the timing lags which will occur on e.g. windows and slower PC's.
To achieve this targets a low cost well known microcontroller system, the arduino, will do the job. It (e.g. the arduino uno) will have an integrated USB-interface and enough ports to handle most parallel port stepper motor boards and do additional tasks like PWM for wire heating. The development environment for arduino is free and well documented.
To start with USBSerial the following hardware parts are necessary:
1x Arduino uno board with USB cable (normally around 30€, but I think hobby king in china, sells them now for 15$ with cable)
1x Connector to your Stepper board (e.g. a 25 pin Sub-D connector, ~2€)
1x Connector to arduino board (header with ~20pin, ~2€)
Now short wires need to be soldered between the arduino and the stepper board connectors.
For the letmathe mdlcnc board I did it as follows:
[pre]
Arduino uno LPT Sub-D connector
12 1 All motors On/Off
8 2 X step
9 3 X direction
10 4 Y step
11 5 Y direction
4 6 Z step (X2)
5 7 Z direction (X2)
6 8 A step (Y2)
7 9 A direction (Y2)
GND 18-25 Ground
[/pre]
If this is done, all hardware parts are ready and the software part can be started.
Other boards my need a different wiring and an adapted arduino software too.
I will explain the software part in the next post:)
now starting with the basics. The purpose of the new jedicut plugin USBSerial is to use jedicut on PC's and Laptops without a parallel Interface, which is nowadays more and more the case. But all PC's have a USB-interface which can be used.
A second target was to do the timing for the stepper motors and a possible PWM Modulation for the wire heating not on the PC because of the timing lags which will occur on e.g. windows and slower PC's.
To achieve this targets a low cost well known microcontroller system, the arduino, will do the job. It (e.g. the arduino uno) will have an integrated USB-interface and enough ports to handle most parallel port stepper motor boards and do additional tasks like PWM for wire heating. The development environment for arduino is free and well documented.
To start with USBSerial the following hardware parts are necessary:
1x Arduino uno board with USB cable (normally around 30€, but I think hobby king in china, sells them now for 15$ with cable)
1x Connector to your Stepper board (e.g. a 25 pin Sub-D connector, ~2€)
1x Connector to arduino board (header with ~20pin, ~2€)
Now short wires need to be soldered between the arduino and the stepper board connectors.
For the letmathe mdlcnc board I did it as follows:
[pre]
Arduino uno LPT Sub-D connector
12 1 All motors On/Off
8 2 X step
9 3 X direction
10 4 Y step
11 5 Y direction
4 6 Z step (X2)
5 7 Z direction (X2)
6 8 A step (Y2)
7 9 A direction (Y2)
GND 18-25 Ground
[/pre]
If this is done, all hardware parts are ready and the software part can be started.
Other boards my need a different wiring and an adapted arduino software too.
I will explain the software part in the next post:)