Can someone please post a picture of the current control boards on the PRO and 2nd gen CrossFire. I have an original CrossFire and would like to use FireControl, but I don’t feel like waiting until 2025/2030 for Langmuir to offer the upgrade. So if I can get a photo and discern what they are using for a control board I will just do the upgrade myself.
Thanks!
I believe it is a full custom board designed and fabbed by Langmuir. The piece parts might be generic building blocks, but the interconnects are theirs. There has been enough sleuthing to postulate that the THC control module is an off the shelf Arduino Nano, but then the code is full custom. The SW on the controller is GRBL, but that would then be custom configured for their connections.
In short, I haven’t seen enough data to make me think it could be replicated easily.
It did occur to me that you could use your own control board (some Arduino variant) and put GRBL on yourself. Then you can modify the GRBL code to handle any ‘unusual’ codes that come from FireControl and fairly quickly interate to a working solution.
Yeah I don’t understand why they just don’t sell the control board to us…I have CNC’ed several mills and routers…not a big deal…
I doubt the controller is the issue. Making a Z axis/THC upgrade that ‘anybody’ could install is not trivial. If you’ve done it before then you understand. And, if you’ve done it before, you know what’s holding you back. It’s not the controller board or even the controller SW. It’s the mechanics of the Gantry, limit & proximity switches, figuring out how you’d stitch in the new stuff to whatever ‘old’ stuff you keep.
Also, I don’t think they expected to be hampered by supply, virus, or tariffs that are making it very hard to deliver on plans made a year ago. Frankly, it would be unwise to rush them into doing something before ‘its time’…
Net: If you can do it, do it. If not, wait until the ‘turnkey’ system is ready. I toyed with the latter, but decided pretty early to control my own destiny. I’m on my own with my own implementation, but, the best part of that is that it’s ‘my own’.
Frankly I don’t understand your first paragraph. The mechanics are actually very simple, maybe tedious to mill, but thats it. As far as limit and proximity switches, those are simple devices and frankly very easy to install and configure. In fact, I am converting an EMCO Turn 50 with 5 tool turrent now to use a Centroid Acorn controller, which is far more involved (indexer, etc.). lol. I just finished upgrading an 80 watt laser to use new SW. And unwise to rush them? I don’t even understand that statement? When did it become wrong to ask a company to keep their promises? We as consumers do that all the time with almost everything we purchase in our lives. lol.
But for arguments sake lets say I have a PRO and my controller board and associated stepper drivers, etc. go bad. They should be able to sell me a replacement right now. So check 1. So the long pole in the tent is the THC machined aluminum parts for the OG CrossFire gantry, which shouldn’t take over a year to develop. Check 2. Next, making a good install manual for people to do the install that are NOT Computer Engineers (which I am BTW), I would say maybe a week with good illustrations and testing. Check 3.
Done. lol
So why have I not done it yet? Because I am doing other projects right now and would rather pay them for their time to get r done…lol Maybe they should do the same and farm it out… 
The difficult part is making a ‘kit’ that anyone can install to an existing system. That is tricky, especially with people who have difficulty building the original kit. If they don’t design a kit right, ie, good documentation, tutorials, parts that fit, then they and their customers will have a big mess and, to my mind, they shouldn’t rush that.
Further, ‘keeping promises’, made in 2019, to be delivered in 2020 is a ridiculous notion. No one predicted where we would be now so, again, it’s time to reset expectations. Note that their silence on the matter COULD be interpreted as not really wanting to make any more promises that can’t be kept due to totally unpredictable situation we’re in now.
Ok, so maybe they can give us a new ECD (notice the estimated part) …Like we will have it in 2024. At least we will know they INTEND to do it. Do you think that is reasonable? lol. We have all had to deal with COVID and it did not seem to dent their ability to bring a new welding table to market and also update FireControl. Bottom line is they have already done the hard work…i.e. the second-gen CrossFires came with the new controller! lol…they have already done it…nothing to really figure out…sell us a new control box…this is not rocket science…
Totally understand that this is frustrating and we are farther along with this than it seems. Our top priority is delivering PROs and CrossFires to paid customers and our production (independent of product dev, software dev) is taken up almost entirely by that. We do hope/plan to sneak a production run of these sometime in 2021.
Thank you.