Hi, my name is Tom. I have been working in industrial maintenance and repair (CNC machine tools) for 20+ years. I have a bit of experience with electronics already. I have worked with microcontrollers, FPGA’s and electronics in general. I’m here to try and up my game in electronics in all respects.
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Welcome Tom! Looking forward to see what your experience will bring to projects.
CNCs are awesome! I always overestimate the importance of the motor drive (analog) piece of CNCs and always underestimate just how much data crunching/logic is required to get those devices humming along.
Welcome!
They can be fun to play with. Not much analog left in them though, only the voltages at the servo motors and even that is synthesized digitally. One of my goals is to build closed loop position control for whatever home projects I dream up. Lately I have been working with reading encoders at higher RPM’s. Microcontrollers are a bit limited in this respect due to clock speeds. FPGA’s / CPLD’s look to be the answer. At this point I am not far from basic position control using PWM & DC motors. The real challenge will come with implementing a rudimentary form of PID control for both position and velocity loops.