More on my lathe conversion

[Saltfever]

Thanks Tony, for the fast reply. I will revisit this and take a new look based on your reply and encouragement.

BTW, James is one of the rare you tubers who has no advertisements! There is the obligatory one that You Tube wedges in there at the begining but that is not James' fault.

[tonyfoale]

2025 UPDATE.
The PCB described above worked flawlessly but about two years after fitting it I made some more modifications to the lathe to be able to use it as a cam grinder. I saw that with some small changes to the PCB design it could be used for both normal lathe work and the cam grinding. I only had to run different firmware on the ESP32. So it was back to JLCPCB to get some more boards made, but this time I was not in a rush and selected the slow shipping option which was much cheaper. The PCBs are very cheap but shipping is not.

As I needed a new PCB design I took the opportunity to use opto-couplers to isolate all the external inputs, these replaced the level shifter that I previously used and give more flexibility over the type of inputs that can be used.

To make the change over easy I have two ESP32 breakout boards, one programmed for the lathe and the other for the grinder. So it is quick and easy to swap the controller logic between different tasks. The first PCB design was purely a lathe control only, I designed the replacement as a general purpose two axes controller and I have a new very different project coming along and the latest PCB design will be suitable for that also, with different firmware loaded.

Following are pix of the original PCB (left) and the latest (right).