Finally have spindle control wired up. Only minor fudging required. I’ll be making a quick 3D printed board holder for the pcbs, and then mounting it inside next to the VFD. Next up writing that widget!
Very col beans. So are you using modbus or maping the 0-10v into the VFD?
@Steve_Anken 0-10v ATM
I never hooked my 3040 spindle up to my TinyG yet, rather I manually turn it on. So I need to mimic your work here.
@jlauer simple level shifter (opto isolator didn’t work for pwm) with 5v on the high side, coming from the VFD. PWM to 0-10v board, external 12v supply. Relay board also runs on 12v, opto isolated inputs work with TinyG 3.3 directly. I’ll throw together a blog post, but ultimately I’ll design a custom pcb to do everything on one board.
Ahh. Well, I still have that basic 300w spindle, so pretty different setup than your VFD.
@jlauer true
Simple on/off for/rev is easy as pie. $6 relay board will do it
Well, I need PWM speed control to the original spindle driver board that came with the 3040. It wasn’t super easy on day one, so I just never did it.
if that board takes PWM 5v, a simple level shifter and 5v supply should work.
I need to try the level shifter I have sitting here. Should be relatively easy to test. I have a 200w spindle so that might be why I’m getting 6,000 rpm for the hall sensor. As for the relay, do you have a preferred approach? Most of the relays seem to be 5v 12v and SSRs that take 3v are expensive.
Your board sounds interesting. Thanks for the push to get the spindle PWM working and for jumping in with some serious chops.
the relay board I have takes 12v on the high side of the optocouplers, which worked out nice for the pwm to analog board, as they both share a 12v wall adapter. But you can get some pretty cheap relay boards for the raspberry pi, which is also 3.3v gpio.
So you are not using power from the 6040 box? I was kinda trying to keep everything inside the 3040 box, including a rPi3 for the SPSJ server.
Looking forward to more about what you are doing. I have two larger machine builds that went on hold. We are planning on completing them using what we learn from tricking out the smaller machines and on one we want to try some servos rather than steppers.
I have everything enclosed in the cabinet Im using. I got my 6040 without any electronics, just the frame kit.
After another 3D printed part, I’m finally done with the control hardware! Ready to close the door!missing/deleted image from Google+
missing/deleted image from Google+
That setup is just gorgeous.
Although, I am worried about Rpi3 running ChiliPeppr in a fast way.
@jlauer thanks man. I’m all about aesthetics 
@jlauer aside from the aa issues, it doesn’t seem to be a problem at all. It’s running raspbian lite, booting straight to chromium. Never gets past 20% CPU on any of the 4 cores. Big gcode jobs do take a while to load in chilipeppr, but doesn’t seem to have any issue running them.