Hardware
Designed and Produced by Promach Austrailia. The first hardware interface for JC3 CAD/CAM/Motion Control at the machine
$299.00
Orders ship from the US in 1–3 business days. Standard (5–10 days) and priority (2–4 days) shipping available at checkout.
Hardware is non-returnable; defective items replaced within 30 days of delivery. Email admin@jetcad.io for support.
The StrikeCommand Gen 5 was built to make CNC plasma motion control simple — whether you're wiring a new machine from scratch or retrofitting an existing table. Everything you need is on one board: homing, dual-driven gantry with auto-squaring, torch height control, plasma source interfacing, and a spare G-code-controlled relay for spindle, router, or engraving attachments.
Power the board directly from 110–250 VAC (50/60 Hz) mains — onboard supplies eliminate the need for separate DC power supplies in your control box.
4-axis opto-isolated step/direction outputs (X, Y1, Y2, Z) — clean signaling to any standard stepper or servo drive
Dual-driven gantry support with auto-squaring — independent Y1/Y2 control squares your gantry on every homing cycle
Isolated inputs for homing, breakaway, floating head, and ohmic touch-off
Spare onboard relay, fully controllable from G-code — run a spindle for routing or engraving attachments, air solenoids, or anything else your machine needs
Ohmic touch-off and floating head touch-off are both built in — no add-on boards, no external sensing modules. Run whichever fits your machine:
Ohmic only — fast, accurate material sensing straight off the torch shield
Floating head only — dead-simple mechanical sensing, immune to material condition
Staged failover — ohmic first, with floating head as automatic fallback. Rusty, painted, or dirty sheet defeats the ohmic circuit? The floating head catches it and the cut keeps running instead of erroring out.
CPC interface compatible with any plasma source
Dry-contact arc enable relay — no voltage pushed into your plasma source's start circuit
Onboard, user-configurable voltage divider for arc voltage measurement
Arc OK (arc transfer) input for reliable motion interlocking
When running a Hypertherm plasma source (currently verified on the Powermax45 XP and Powermax SYNC series — other amperages haven't been tested yet), we recommend adding an inline analog isolation module (such as this one) between the divided arc voltage output and the board. Thermacut sources have shown no need for external isolation and work fine connected directly.
An upcoming board revision moves this isolation onboard with a galvanically isolated arc voltage front end — no external module required.
The ESP32-based MCU runs our custom branch of FluidNC, extending the original project with:
Per-axis velocity jogging — LinuxCNC jogging parity, real independent-axis jog control
CRC32 redundant streaming protocol over USB serial — a must-have in the electrically noisy plasma environment
Integrated high-performance AVTHC — arc voltage torch height control built into the motion firmware itself, not bolted on
Run the board with the GcodePilot workspace in JetCad3 and you get everything JC3 offers for plasma CAD/CAM plus first-class machine control — design, nest, post, and cut without ever leaving the app:
Post to Machine — one click sends the job from the CAM sheet straight to the connected machine. No file exports, no USB stick sneakernet.
Live toolpath view with real-time DRO — watch the cut progress on the actual nest, with live X/Y/Z position and feed rate
Smart Pause — pause and resume cuts without losing your place or your part
Run From Here with live cut tuning — re-enter a program at any arbitrary point, not just at line boundaries, and dial in feed and THC voltage while cutting
Frame Tool — trace the job's outline over the sheet before firing the torch, so you know it fits before you commit
Virtual plate squaring — set up a sheet without physically tramming it along an axis
Wireless pendant — jog and control the machine from your phone, standing right at the table
In-app firmware flashing and updates — flash and configure the board's firmware from inside GcodePilot; no command-line tools, no esptool
Travel limits & bounds check — catches a job that would over-travel the machine before a single motion command is streamed
Run history & metrics — every run logged with cut time and stats
Full NGC G-code stack (RS274) — flow control, subroutines, loops, and conditional expressions; the complete LinuxCNC G-code spec is supported
And here's the part that matters when you're buying hardware: GcodePilot is never metered and never locked. Machine control is free in JetCad3 forever — no subscription required to run your table. The paid tiers cover CAD/CAM design time; cutting is always free.
Torch crashes happen. What matters is how fast you're cutting again.
When the breakaway trips, the machine performs an immediate quick-stop and retract — and then hands the machine back to you. Jog anywhere you need, snap the torch back onto the breakaway, clear the tip, sort out whatever went wrong. Then press play.
The cut resumes exactly where the arc extinguished — not at the nearest G-code line, not at the start of the current profile. Mid-move, mid-arc, wherever it died, that's where it re-fires. No scrapped sheets, no guessing at jump-in points, no re-cutting finished geometry.
The StrikeCommand Gen 5 ships in every new CNC plasma machine built by ProMach Ltd (Corowa, NSW, Australia).