Plug and play ShopBot swap

[Toaster]

I took it upon myself to reverse engineer the ShopBot control pins and I came up with a way to swap in a Centroid to a ShopBot Desktop without messing with any wires on the ShopBot itself:

This is tested and working on a Desktop and Handibot. I will caution that there's a lot of differences between even seemingly identical ShopBots so your mileage may vary.

I did this just to prove that it can work. Is it a good idea? Well for a few more dollars on this Desktop you could upgrade to some much beefier stepper drivers... But if you HAD to keep the original SB electronics, or wanted the ability to swap back in minutes, this might be a good route.

I switched away from SB controls on my other machine and I hung on to the boards just in case I ever wanted to switch back.. And I never have.

[Gary Campbell]

Eric...
Did you connect the VFD to analog speed control?

[Toaster]

I mapped the pins on the ShopBot board for the VFD to turn on. If you supply 5volts to ShopBots input 1 and 4 the VFD comes on (provided you have the key interlock turned on)

It's still manual speed control, I haven't looked into that spindle to see if I could do speed control from the Centroid.

Right now I'm fine with the manual knob. As it stands right now this setup requires no altering of the ShopBot wiring or programming the VFD.

If I was going to make this a permanent install I'd wire in the speed control, swap the steppers, etc...

[Toaster]

Here's the pin map I made:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Let me know if that makes any sense to anyone...

[cnckeith]

cool! thanks for posting!