Quote Originally Posted by Neale View Post
When you want lots of i/o capability! Essentially, it just adds more. I only mention it in connection with your ATC plans, as I have seen a number of comments here in the past about needing more i/o connections to control these. Maybe that means "more than available on an old-fashioned LPT port", though. I don't use an ATC on my mill or my router, so have no personal experience with them. I used a UC300ETH to replace the original Ethernet SmoothStepper on my mill, and while I don't have an ATC, I do have both a touch probe plus a fixed tool-height sensor on the bed. I have written a few macros so that on a tool-change, the machine automatically calibrates tool length by measuring itself on the tool-height sensor so even though I change tools manually (usually milling cutters in a collet so no possibility of presetting tool length, or swapping to a drill chuck) I can continue with minimal delay. Kind of poor-man's ATC!

On the mill, I could use the existing breakout board but on the router, I bought the UCBB, more so that I was future-proofed than because I needed the extra connections. I'm using UCCNC on both machines (replacing Mach3) and am very happy with it - although I prefer the older screen layout of UCCNC to the latest version. Personal taste.

Again, thinking about the router, I have a lot of cables running parallel to each other, with limit switches, VFD connections to the spindle, and stepper motor connections, all very close. That's one reason why I wanted 24V signalling, for better interference rejection, and as far as I can tell, this has never been a problem on my machine. I did pay a lot of attention to earthing, of course, with wired earth connections that bridge the profile rail bearings so that I am not relying on the bearings for earthing. Had plenty of problems with proximity limit switches but that's because I bought a cheap box of them from eBay when I built the machine and they are not super-reliable...
Thanks for that info.

I think it great that you have the fixed probe. I presume in your macros, the software will be able to work out the difference of the fixed probe height vs spoil board/workpiece height?


https://cncdrive.com/downloads/UCBB_manual.pdf

I had a read of the manual for the UCBB. From my understanding, you need the UC300ETH-5LPT and the UCBB tethers onto this via the ribbon cable?

In the initial post you advised not to get this?

Am I getting confused?