Hello everyone!
I'm Ryan and I am from the Midwest in the United States
My background is over 30 years as an electronics hobbyist, I have a degree in electronics and work in electronics professionally. So yeah, I'm pretty much up to my elbows in electronics from the minute I wake up until my head hits the pillow again in the evening!
I also dabble in programming from PC and Linux based stuff to PIC's and arduinos and various other microcontrollers. I'm a bit more comfortable in the 8 bit end of the pool, but I know enough about ARM and the like to be dangerous 😁
I just bought a 4 axis 3040 ballscrew style desktop "engraver' and have already started doing some mods to it so I can cut some material other than wood! My projects are mostly for project enclosures and panel layouts and stuff like that. Some light aluminum work will be my limit on this machine.
I have been looking for a better solution than the typical mach3-linuxcnc / parallel port configuration of these things. I've gutted the original stepper drivers for some better micro stepping models and took out the parallel board. I was planning on a smoothie clone but after buying one (of course) I start finding all kinds of weird quirks after more in depth research. I've honestly been thinking of doing a switching circuit that will let me simply swap between controllers with a rotary switch to whatever, that way I always have something to fall back to!
I ran across a forum post where someone mentioned the DDCSV (MMCNC/Pandora 😎) unit as the better alternative to the smoothie and that led me to here. Of course reading of the work that's being done to crack the thing and make it more open source really got me excited! That along with the fact it just sounds so much more straight forward having an off line controller.
As a final note to my long introduction, I'd like to say I really have enjoyed reading your posts as a guest thus far, you guys seem super cool and patient with each other, which is always good when you're trying to learn! I will also try to be as helpful as I can with respect to my background when it come to things electronic!
Warmest regards,
-Ryan