electronic lead screw

[greenail]

Fantastic Greenail look FWD to end result.
But will need info like how the tablet connects to the control board etc. Marvellous!
U have taken ELS into 21st century with cream on top! Cheers
Agree re no topslide extra stabilty too, esp on my old clunker.

i suppose the entire lines of offset & incremental feed & Total feed decimal places will be truncated on the display to
not dazzle the user?

the esp32 has wifi builtin as well as bluetooth, it connects via websockets for quick updates. The page is "serverless" and you just plug in the IP address of the ELS and it connects.

decimal places is easy to clean up, but as with everything there are always lots of easy fixes...

 

[Qtron]

Hope you are well..
Thanks for explaining.
Has it been 'released' ?

 

[greenail]

Hope you are well..
Thanks for explaining.
Has it been 'released' ?

not sure what you are asking, it is available but I need some testers. I've been using it for a few months without issue.

 

[Qtron]

Thankyou for your reply - just asking if it is in a usable state- which it must be!
Yes would love to try it
is all the info avail, re how to get it into an ESP32, I have never used one, have only prog'd an arduino,
How to wire it all up etc?

 

[greenail]

Thankyou for your reply - just asking if it is in a usable state- which it must be!
Yes would love to try it
is all the info avail, re how to get it into an ESP32, I have never used one, have only prog'd an arduino,
How to wire it all up etc?

you can program them just like an arduino with the arduino IDE. you can pick them up all over the web (amazon) for ~$5.

If you want to test create an issue here: https://github.com/jschoch/ESPels/issues and we can work through the documentation. Right now the machine specific settings are compiled in but they can be saved in EEPROM and it would be easier to make changes, I just need a reason (like you testing) to write that code.

The configuration is:

encoder resolution setting
lead screw pitch in mm (everything is in mm but the conversion is easy)
stepper driver microstepping
wifi ssid/password


The wiring in it's simplest form is:

encoder A/B signal pins, power and ground.
stepper step/dir pins+ ground.

Once it is wired up you can go here http://espels.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index.html and use this to connect to the esp32, or you can run it locally on your network via the source code and node.js https://github.com/jschoch/espELSfrontend.

 

[Qtron]

i looked at the github referred to, Jesse, It doesnt define which ESP32 to use, as far as I can tell.
There are many terms used in there & in the readme, which I dont understand. (i.e., "uses react and websockets to make awesome")
I also don't know what you mean by 'node.js', as above.
I think a lot more detail will be needed to get it going..
ESP32 choices on ebay are: [ https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/ESP-WRO...345595?hash=item343f8a92fb:g:V4AAAOSwiBhgAnrN ]
ESP-WROOM-32 ESP32U,
ESP-WROOM-32 ESP32D,
ESP32 38 Pin,
ESP32 30 pin.
pls define.
In the above reply, the ESP32 pins are not defined for the encoder signals, nor the step & dir pins - please define!
cheers,

 

[greenail]

you want a dual core esp32 (not esp32-s). You don't need PSRAM so you don't need to get a wrover type, get the wroom. There are also different names for the modules which have a U.FL antenna connector. you may or may not need this based on your wifi signal. I don't use one and my lathe is about 40ft from my wifi router. here is some more info

ESP32 Modules and Boards - ESP32 - — ESP-IDF Programming Guide latest documentation

The easiest recommendation for you is to get a esp32 devkitc v4, other boards will work but this is the common reference design.

The pins depend on the board you buy but most of the pins are fully configurable. There are plenty of available pins on the devkitc and here is a handy reference to the usable pins

ESP32 Pinout Reference: Which GPIO pins should you use? | Random Nerd Tutorials

The ESP32 comes with 48 GPIOs with multiple functions. This article intends to be a simple and easy to follow reference guide for the ESP32 GPIOs.

randomnerdtutorials.com

it may be easier for you to open an issue on github in the repo for us to document all this.

Regarding terms:

"react" React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is an open-source, front end, JavaScript library[3] for building user interfaces or UI components. It is very common and well supported.

"websockets" While html (for web pages) is stateless, websockets is stateful and allows bidirectional communication between the espELS and the web app you use to control it. This just boils down to it being faster and easier to use for this application.

"node.js" is a development platform that folks use to develop javascript applications. This is only used when developing the react user interface or to run the react webapp locally on your network. The app can be "transpiled" into static files which I have provided a link for hosted on amazon's S3 cloud service.

 

[AlanB]

I was looking at a Pi Pico here and thinking it might be suitable for an ELS. Dual core, $4, 133 MHz, Hmmm. One core for UI, one for the real-time. The hardware PIOs could also be used for reading encoders and generating motor pulses, though I don't think it would be required. Might just put it on this new PM-1228. How is the ESP-32 setup doing?

 

[greenail]

I was looking at a Pi Pico here and thinking it might be suitable for an ELS. Dual core, $4, 133 MHz, Hmmm. One core for UI, one for the real-time. The hardware PIOs could also be used for reading encoders and generating motor pulses, though I don't think it would be required. Might just put it on this new PM-1228. How is the ESP-32 setup doing?

The ESP32 is great because the user interface can be used from a phone or tablet or PC. You can also have different configs for different operations. Designing a good hardware user interface is hard, development is hard, and forget about changing it without having to redo everything. You'd have to add a wifi or bluetooth interface to the pi pico to get that benefit.

 

[AlanB]

I'd prefer for my lathe ELS software to be stable, and not need to be updated years later because some phone library was no longer valid. I do agree that user interfaces are hard, and I don't want something like the popular ELS that uses a $2 LED display/button board with severe limitations and lack of flexibility. Better interfaces are possible these days with a rotary encoder knob (or two) and a graphical display and in this case perhaps a dedicated switch or two (even better than a phone interface). Once it works, lay in a few spare parts and only touch it if you want to improve it. At some point it is done and no further changes are needed, and it keeps working till the hardware breaks. So while a phone interface is neat, I don't think I want one on my lathe, but that's just me.

My 3D printers do have wireless interfaces, and that's fine because someone else is maintaining it, I don't have to hack the code every few years to keep it working. If the hackers were to get in they could overheat a heater or send a little motor past the limits, but that's hardly comparable to what they could do with a 2hp lathe ELS. Scary thought.

There are some Pico boards that have Wifi etc. Perhaps even using an ESP32. If that is needed it is best offloaded to separate processors.