Smoothieboard can be made to work for more than 3 axes question

Controllers Smoothie
#1

" Smoothieboard can be made to work for more than 3 axes. We are not talking about extruders here ( these are supported separately, see Extruder ), but rotational axes, like those for example used for 4 or 5 axis machining."

I am building a pharma pick and place type machine using a laser XY machine. In addition to XY positioning, I hope to use Smoothie board to run a stepper to rotate a cam and another stepper to rotate a sorter. So 4 axis. I don’t understand the comment about extruders. I just want to run the additional two axes using gcode like Z and A axis. Can someone clarify?

#2

It looks like you are quoting from http://smoothieware.org/6axis which about using axes that aren’t driving extruders. According to that page, you’ll have to recompile smoothieware to do that.

#3

Thanks for the quick reply. I guess i don’t understand what is different/special about an extruder vs just another generic axis. Can i command these additional axis’ using g-code? Are there limit switch pins for all axis? I need homing on all (4) axis. I’m hoping to recompile tonight but, coming from the Marlin world, I’ve guess I have some reading to do first I think. Pretty cool board.

#4

I’m not a smoothie user or developer, so I’m just trying to help figure out what the question is for @Arthur_Wolf who actually knows what he’s talking about here. :wink:

#5

As you can see at http://smoothieware.org/6axis, yes there are endtsops for ABC axes. The main difference with extruders is they are addressed with the ABC letters instead of the E letters, they don’t have the special extruder features/finetunings, and they have endstops. What do you want to use these for?