Its not a case of putting an encoder on an existing stepper, you need a drive that can insert the extra steps. If the stepper misses a step the encoder detects it and the drive inserts extra steps They have an encoder which closes the loop back at the stepper driver.
My assumption is that I need 3 power supplies, and run the gecko off one of the axes? Then I wire the signal output from the gecko to the individual closed loop drivers and wire the alarm from each driver into the emergency stop? Sorry if this seems obvious, I did some searching but still want to make sure I'm heading in the right direction. How do I go about making this work together? It looks like the closed loop steppers each use an individual power supply with their controller. My question is how do I go about upgrading my current system? I was looking at the following closed loop stepper system: That way if the steppers bind I can at least have it trip the e-stop so I don't have to babysit it quite so much. Fortunately I was able to hit the e-stop button quickly enough to save the parts, but this has me considering closed loop hybrid steppers like the ones from stepper online. I've oiled the machine and did my best to get it dialed in, but it still seems to happen sometimes. The mill is performing great, but a few times the steppers have bound up and knocked everything out of whack when doing long, detailed work.
I'm going to be making small injection molds out of aluminum, so I ran some very small bits and did some highly precise finishing passes. I've managed to get this up and running with Mach3 on a computer running XP, and have been putting the machine through it's paces. I recently bought a Taig CNC from the vendor Deepgroove1, they include a Geckodrive G540 enclosed with a 48V 350W power supply to go along with their Nema 23 2NM steppers. I'm a product designer by trade and I'm very new to this stuff, so I appreciate your patience and assistance.