Hey, thinking about switching to odrives for my cnc-build and need some help to start out. Is there any other way of controlling the odrives from a cnc-controller then to use the step/dir interface? And are there any disadvantages by using step/dir to control the odrives?
Hi there!
This definitely depends on the CNC controller itself. We support UART and CAN bus (as well as USB and STEP/DIR). If your CNC controller is flexible and programmable, then either UART or CAN is great, as it supports high bandwidth bidirectional communication, and you can couple that with things like velocity/torque feedforwards. That being said, I think this is pretty uncommon, and STEP/DIR works just fine. Really the only main disadvantage is the fact that you don’t get digital feedback from the ODrive, e.g. actual encoder position, motor temperature, etc. But we have plenty of people just using STEP/DIR for CNCs or 3D printers, and it works great for their application!