Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Looking for some help upgrading my older Mach3 Novakon M200 w/steppers to Acorn. I know that my existing computer setup will not work.

I also have an existing Acorn board on my mini lathe with Geckos that runs fine with my laptop. So I am somewhat familiar with wiring it up.

I need to keep my machine running daily for business and plan on building a second box to just plug in when ready. I do have an extra Novakon BOB and Gecko's mounted.

Anyone done the same upgrade, Any advice?

David.Munson@FineArtLight.com 314-369-3913 St. Louis area

make a photo album of the machine, populate with lots of machine and electronics and i'm sure you will get some good advice here.

I have a converted Novakon NM200 mill with steppers that uses an acorn. The extra Novakon BOB is of no use for the conversion and will be replaced by the acorn.

What drives do you have? I used the original drives that came with the mill with the acorn retrofit.

Do you have any specific questions?

Yes mine is the original Novakon m200 that they built to decide how to build the rest. I will photograph the machine and steps that I think i need to do and let comments to guide me away from potential problems.

My plan is to create a new control box that will allow me to plug in all the original cables to the machine, while keeping the original Novakon CD-100 computer running in case something goes wrong.

Ok I looked at the manual their controller has evolved a lot. Mine is very spacious and easy to access the components. Once you use the acorn I doubt you will ever want to use the Mach control again.

Do you have the power drawbar?

Sorry I missed this yesterday. My business has been really busy and between quotes and orders, I'm slammed.

No power bar, I have a Device that holds a butterfly ratchet for changing tooling.

How big of power supply do you have? the one in my cabinet is real heavy and supposedly big enough to power 4 stepper at 7.5A each. I will work on photos later tonight.

OK not having the power drawbar makes things easier.

The setup in mine does not have an actual power supply just a 620 watt transformer. It feeds to the stepper drives and the power is converted for the steppers in there. There are taps for 50 VAC for the stepper drives and a tap for 24 VAC this only powers the work light.

Sorry for the delay but I'm finally get back to upgrading Novakon 200 from mach3 to acorn.

Here is a photo of the CD-100 computer module with 4 gecko G203V stepper drives and breakout Board C11G attached to removable metal mount.


Side view


Here is the metal mount removed with the acorn mounted on the back side. I removed the novakon BOB board and have transfered the white
wires over to the DB-25 connector on the acorn and the analog 0-10 VDC to the acorn.



Now I confused where the side connections with the pull up resistors 1KOhm go on the acorn board.



I'm also confused where the coolant relay is attached to the acorn relay board.




Any help would be appreciated.

DavidMunson@DavidMunson.com

The white wires are more than likely your limit/home switches since they have a pull up resistor in the input. The coolant relay wire will just go on the Acorn relay board and you set the output up in the wizard. You'll need to identify all the wires one by one and connect them to the Acorn inputs and set the inputs in the wizard the same way you set the relay outputs. All this is in the install manual.

Thanks.. Do I need to put the resistors on the acorn board?