I have bought a second hand CNC machine. The control system is disconnected but there are both 4 x TB6600-4.0 controllers and a Spark Concepts CNC.xPROV5 controller. They both appear to do the same job. Is one better than another when coupled with a 1.5Kw spindle and VFD?
The XPRO V5 has more modern Trinamic drivers. The TB6600s have nothing to do with a spindle; they control only steppers and are driven from a controller. The XPRO V5 is a controller that includes four stepper drivers and controls the VFD for your spindle.
I expect that TB6600 controllers are not valuable to you, and would guess (given no other information) that they are from a previous iteration of the hardware.
Have you found Home · Spark-Concepts/xPro-V5 Wiki · GitHub yet?
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Brilliant, thank you, that’s most helpful. Does this also mean that the Arduino is also redundant?
I’ll look up that site you’ve linked once i get back home.
Thanks again.
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Yeah, I’d expect that the original owner did Arduino + TB6600 as a first iteration, then tried the xPRO V5 as the next control iteration.
This is all guesswork. Feel free to share pictures and more info if it doesn’t make sense!
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Just to helps with understanding what these parts are:
Stepper motors are often controlled by what are called Stepper Drivers and they really are an interface between the controller board which is telling the stepper motors how to turn. They require their own higher voltage and higher power Power Supply since the stepper motors require far more power than the little controller board.
Your 4 TB6600s are only stepper motor drivers and once connected they won’t do a thing without another unit, a controller board telling them what to do.
An Arduino, when loaded with software called firmware can be connected up to the TB6600s stepper motor drivers and control them and there is firmware software called GRBL which has been used for over a decade doing just that.
Newer and more powerful controller boards have come about thanks to the 3D printer boom and the drop in price of desktop laser cutters and CNC router machines. Since 3D printers use much smaller stepper motors, the stepper motor drivers were also much smaller and often were packaged on the controller board. So you literally connected the stepper motors to the controller board.
When people finally woke up to what the Trinamic stepper motor drivers(I was using them in early 2000s) were capable of these started showing up and they are more efficient with powering stepper motors and therefore larger stepper motors could be controlled by them.
This is probably where the xPRO V5 controller board+stepper motor drivers came in.
I’ve literally been down the path I mentioned above and all configurations were successfully uses. But then again, my background includes college degrees and professional work in/with electronics, embedded and application software, and robotics. Getting this stuff working is not for everyone.
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As all of the motors and limit switches were disconnected, I’m in the process of reconnecting all, however, in addition to a Z limit switch, the system has X and Y minimum and maximum limit switches. The XPRO V5 only seems to have input for one limit switch per axis. Are you able to tell me if I’m correct in that assumption and if so, which switch should I use?
Also, is there specific software I need to download onto my laptop to interact with both the XPRO V5 and the the Folinn VFD?
Cheers
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It’s pretty common to hook up both limit switches to a single input on the theory that the controller knows what direction it is moving and therefore which switch tripped.
Universal Gcode Sender (UGS) is a pretty common tool for talking to the controller. There are others.
The controller should talk to the VFD. It might do that over a 0–10V analog interface. Some VFDs have an RS-485 serial interface. That’s not the same as an RS-232 like you might remember from older PCs.
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What can I say? I really appreciate you making your knowledge available. I’ll get to work on it now. The VFD is using the RS-485 cable which is one of the few things still connected! 
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@dougl
Thank you for this informative explanation! Learned a lot from that. // JRO
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My aim is to take 2D photos and convert them to a routed 3D wooden product, probably with no more than about 30mm maximum depth of cut. This will be for hobby purposes as an aged pensioner. I would be grateful for any direction on suitable software to achieve this.
Look at Stewart’s work in Kiri:Moto with depth maps it might be what you’re looking for.
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@Emuu51 Kiri:Moto is at Kiri:Moto — it’s an open source CAM tool that runs entirely in your browser, so your work stays on your own machine.
You can search this forum for “depth map” to find some information on making depth maps from photos. Perhaps the most useful place to start is:
(Don’t worry about the “3D LASER ENGRAVING” in the title; depth maps are depth maps…)
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