26Jan
04Aug
Helping You Make The Most Of Your Investment
Whether you require training, technical advice or additional support, we are here to help you make the most of your investment.
09May
Introducing The SYIL X11 CNC Mill – New for 2022!
06May
Emvio Exclusive – Screens For Probing and ATC Management
23Feb
Why You Should Combine CNC Machining And 3D Printing
Is CNC Machining Better Than 3D Printing?
27Jan
The UK’s Biggest Event For Inspiring, Innovating And Connecting Manufacturing.
MACH 2022 IS THE UK’S BIGGEST EVENT FOR INSPIRING, INNOVATING AND CONNECTING MANUFACTURING.
Taking place from 4th-8th April, MACH will be the THE event to connect the world of manufacturing technologies.
MACH is a fantastic event for both exhibitors and visitors. Showcasing live, digital production systems under one roof. At Emvio, we consider MACH an important asset to the UK’s manufacturing sector, providing a platform for us to showcase our products and services, and a great opportunity to meet customers!
This year we are showing some amazing products, including....
Click on the banner to register for free!
01Oct
EMV-25VBB CNC Kit – The story
09Dec
Quick change and repeatable Z tooling for MT3 and R8 spindles?
Industrial and hobby machinists alike all have the same pet hate when it comes to changing tools whether using a Bridgeport knee mill or a bench top CNC mill:
"It takes too long!"
Lets explore this topic and how Emvioeng.com will help small and large workshops alike become more efficient.
11Oct
Smoothstepper series: Lets send some pulses
Welcome to the third instalment of the Smoothstepper series of posts. In this post we discuss what you need to do to make the computer communicate with the Smoothstepper over Ethernet.
When you connect you Smoothstepper to you computer you will need to make a very important decision: Which IP range do you want to use?
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30Sep
Smoothstepper series: Connect it up
Connect it up
In the first post of our series, we discussed some ways to mount your Smoothstepper in your control box. In this post we would like to share some thoughts on how to connect the boards electrically to you drives, switches, encoders and relays.
The most important connection to make is that between your computer and the Smoothstepper. Needless to say, we insist on using a good quality cable for this. All our Ethernet Smoothstepper bundles ship with CAT-6 Ethernet cables. If you have preferred the USB variant then it would be wise to buy a good quality cable and add a ferrite ring to it.
Thinking of the Smoothstepper 2.5 (USB version) or 3 (Ethernet) parallel ports in one (with benefits of course). So you have the options to go with three breakout boards (BOB) that then connect to stepper drives, switches or relays or an all in one solutions that incorporate the drives and the BOBs. The Smoothstepper is outfitted with 26 pin headers on it that will require suitable ribbon cables. We supply ribbon cables with the D25 port connector on the end as we have seen the boards mostly used with BOB's anyway.
As you may already know, Ports 2 and 3 of the Smoothstepper can have pins 2 to 9 set as inputs or outputs in the plugin. When selecting a BOB, make sure you are getting what you want because usually on port 2, pins 2-9 are input only.
For port 1 only, there is no reason not to go with the generic and readily available and cheap 5 axis breakout board. These boards usually offers optical isolation to your Smoothstepper and sometimes comes with a relay built in. Cheap and cheerful!
In some forum discussions it has been noted that the Breakout board optocouplers may not be as quick at reacting to pulses as the Smoothstepper is to send them. This may be the case on some very cheap breakout boards. On the ones we stock, the reaction time of the worst one was 175ns (nano seconds). That means they are able to accomodate frequencies of up to 5MHz, with the Smoothstepper being able to transmit at up to 4MHz.
A number of other suppliers have expansion boards that link directly to the Smoothstepper with the our recommendations being:
- The PDMX-126 is a very capable board and offers a very neat solution for connecting you Smoothstepper up. This is a top notch board that is worth its money if you are willing to pay the price and import duties from the USA.
- Our favorite in terms of value is the unassuming C25 as developed and sold by CNC4PC . This board provides a good saftey barrier between the drives, switches and other peripherals and the Ethernet
