CNC Update 5: Testing interfaces with TurboCNC

Tonight I decided to test out my parallel breakout board and make sure there wasn’t going to be any issues using it to drive the easydrivers. I don’t have the desktop that I plan to use setup yet so I decided to use my workhorse of a laptop that I use to burn eproms with. It is an old CTX laptop with an AMD 300 Mhz processor running Windows 98! I plan on doing a post soon on using old technology laptops to do great things better and faster than some monster machine today. Anyway back on track, there is one thing to watch out for if you are using a breakout board with a cable that you didn’t buy with the board. Most 25 pin cables male to female. Both the computer and the breakout board typically with have a female Db25. So you can use a simple male to male adapter or build one. However if you look at the pin numbering on a male connector and on a female connector you will notice the rows are inverted. So if you use the male to male adapter then the pin 13 will now go to pin 1 and vice versa. You need to realize this before you get started or you could spend a lot of time scratching your head.

As for why I am using TurboCNC instead of Mach3, quite simply my laptop won’t run Mach3 but it will run TurboCNC just fine. Newer laptops have power conservation circuits that will interfere with the timing so don’t expect your really Rad gaming laptop to work for CNC purposes. Especially with Mach3, again some of the older software is a little more forgiving if you can sacrifice the features.

OK, enough rambling here is the video of the test, nothing exciting just a simple demonstration.

Here is a video on how I configured TurboCNC to do the quick test.