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Retro advice needed on Hurco mill

Yeah parallel past 20 Khz is very very dependant on the rest of the machines hardware. EMC2 actualy comes with some latency test software that analizes the machine and helps work out the maximum Speed. Certain drives also have timing limits, perticualy on direction change that can affect maximum step pulse frequency at times.

As to the 10V signal thats a standard industrial interface. Yep emc2 supports that just like it does step and direction, i belive mach supports it too. Normaly thats adding a seperate card in the pc to get that. The good news is thoes style of interface cards also normally have a few channels of IO + some inputs and such. Hence if you can be inclined it can be used for lots of othere aditional features. Because there industrial automation stuff there not cheep though :-(
 
Thanks guys,

Keep the info coming. This is what I want to hear. All the drawbacks of different systems, things to ask & look for. Good & bad reviews.

Hood,

After looking at that individual test, those Gecko 320x's look pretty good.

Macona,

What does it run for one of those Centurion 7 set-ups? Just a guess, not exactly.

Thanks again,

JAckal:cheers:
 
If you are using your existing motors and encoders, check on how many pulse per rev your encoders are. Professional grade cnc servos sometime use quite high resolution encoders, and that divides into the max pulse rate of your controller, and can really limit your top axis speeds.....so then you have to dumb down your encoders to something like 1000 lines, which in quadrature definition can still mean 4000 lines to the controller.
 
bad reviews.

Hood,

After looking at that individual test, those Gecko 320x's look pretty good.
JAckal:cheers:

Have no experience with any of the servo drives there I am afraid so I cant comment other than to say Simpson is at least honest in his reviews by the looks of it.
I use Giddings and Lewis and Allen Bradley DSA/DSD drives and AC servos on my Mill and Lathe including spindles. Dont have a problem with limited speed as I use the SmoothStepper, mill is set to 8m/min and lathe 10m/min but could crank either up to 20m/min if I was brave/stupid enough ;)

Hood
 
I did a Mach3 conversion on my BP sized knee mill and it ended up being a pretty nice machine although you have to live with Mach's occasional quirks. On the flip side while you have to live with the quirks, its customizability is really nice, this is something that even most commercial controllers can't do as well.

However keep in mind that it takes a fair amount of learning and futzing to get a Mach system setup and running. Its one of those things that after you've done it once and lived with it for a while the next one will be way faster. But the first one is going to take you some serious time.

In my case in addition to needing a CNC machine I also wanted to learn more about CNC machines and motion control from the inside out, so killing two birds with one stone made the large time investment worth it to me, and maintainence of the machine is cheap and easy since I know everything about it.

However if you have jobs backed up waiting for a machine you need to think hard about whether it makes economic sense to do a retro fit or just buy a newer working machine.

The other way to go is to look at the entry level Siemens model 802 controllers. They make both analog and digital versions of these, and compared to other commercial controls they are pretty cheap, off the top of my head I can't remember the exact price but I think around $3k or a little less. These wouldn't be as expandable as the Mach approach but would be more reliable and would likely have better performance.

Good luck-

Paul T.
Power Technology
 
Paul,

It would like nice to get a control that was already assembled and a wiring harness that was labeled to where everything went. That would be worth a little more $$$$$ to me.

I know nothing out there will be just a plug and play, no matter how much they advertise it to be.:rolleyes5:

If this something like you were talking about:

ebay.com/Siemens-Sinumerik-802C-Baseline-Controller-NEW


That looks pretty straightforward. I would like to know more. Do you just use this with your Gecko/Viper/Rutex drives? The Siemens web site had a lot of stuff.

This seller is in China ??????:skep: Do all electronics come from there now?:confused::confused:

Thanks,
JAckal:cheers:
 
I converted a Bridgeport Series II Interact 2 to EMC2 and Linux and I am very happy. I used AMC servo drives, which are dirt cheap on ebay and have great mfr support.

This is as low cost as it gets. Plus I get to know my mill inside and out.

I am also not limited by whatever are design limits of the particular control mfr. I mounted a CNC rotary table and will soon add 4th axis interface and rigid tapping.

Today, I am mounting speakers on it to listen to music while machining, or just dickering around in the shop.

Latest pix of my mill are here:

http://igor.chudov.com/projects/Bridgeport-Series-II-Interact-2-CNC-Mill/30-October/

Video of it cutting aluminum is here:

http://igor.chudov.com/projects/Bridgeport-Series-II-Interact-2-CNC-Mill/29-High-Speed-Spindle/

i
 
I think a Cent 7 is just shy of $3k. This may sound like a lot compared to a Mach Retro but its not. You will get nickel and dimed to death putting a Mach system together, I know, I have put a few together.

With the milltronics control you get a flat front panel that that has a color LCD and a PC104 based computer. It has the keyboard and MPG as well. The software is dos based and boots off flash. Has ethernet and serial for DNC and you can connect a HD for mass storage beyond it flash capabilities. The control also supports parametric. The front panel is connected to the breakout via a 2 strand fiber optic cable and the breakout has connections for the analog motors, encoders, limits, estop, and extra IO for tool changers and stuff. A friend of mine bought a lathe and a mill control from them last year. From what I saw of them they are pretty well built.

You might be able to get a Cent 6 cheaper, they are older and have all the electronics in the back cabinet with just the display and keyboard parts in the front panel. Still a very good control. The conversational is great.

You can download a simulator of their control here: http://www.milltronics.net/CNCControl.aspx It is pretty much the same interface as the 6 and 7.

I would NOT use the Gecko 320s o 340s. These drives are old tech compared to the newer drives, noisy for one thing. I have tried tuning them and they suck. You really need a scope to tune them. I would look at the Whale3 or dugong. They can be tuned through their USB port and software.

Another option is get a galil board and control your existing drives. I know they will work under Mach but I dont know anything about EMC2, havnt touched it in years. On the artsoft site there is a list of supported controls.

One more option, one thats going to take a little more effort, is there is a board called YAPSC:10V. It is an open source positioning controller that will convert step/dir signals to +-10v analog and take the feedback from an encoder to close the loop. All the schematics, board files, and firmware are here. YAPSC:10V I am thinking of having a bunch of the boards made myself.

There are a couple other controls like the DSPMC too.

I have used the Allen Bradley servo drives, partly based on Hood's past recommendations and they work nice. The software is pretty straight forward.
 
Paul,

It would like nice to get a control that was already assembled and a wiring harness that was labeled to where everything went. That would be worth a little more $$$$$ to me.

I know nothing out there will be just a plug and play, no matter how much they advertise it to be.:rolleyes5:

If this something like you were talking about:

ebay.com/Siemens-Sinumerik-802C-Baseline-Controller-NEW


That looks pretty straightforward. I would like to know more. Do you just use this with your Gecko/Viper/Rutex drives? The Siemens web site had a lot of stuff.

This seller is in China ??????:skep: Do all electronics come from there now?:confused::confused:

Thanks,
JAckal:cheers:

The 802C is pretty simple to hook up.
There are four encoder inputs for the X, Y, Z, and Spindle encoders.
There are four analog +/- 10 volt signals to drive thos axes, spindle.

There is a built in PLC to control the toolchanger/turret/gear changes. Whatever you need to connect to.

There are sample PLC programs included.

So, if your amplifiers take +/- 10 volt signals, it will hook up and go, once you set the parameters to match your encoder counts, gear ratios etc.

About as simple as it going to get.

If you have drivers that take step and direction, then the 802S will output step and direction signals, and only has a Spindle encoder input.

And it is an industrial control. Designed to run (stay running) in a shop environment.
 
Another option if you already have analogue amps is to look at the mesa boards, I believe EMC can use them and as far as I know the plugin for Mach is, if not fully working already, very close.
The other options I know of for analogue and Mach are DSPMC, K-Flop/K-Analog, Galil.
Hood
 
If this something like you were talking about:

ebay.com/Siemens-Sinumerik-802C-Baseline-Controller-NEW


That looks pretty straightforward. I would like to know more. Do you just use this with your Gecko/Viper/Rutex drives? The Siemens web site had a lot of stuff.

This seller is in China ??????:skep: Do all electronics come from there now?:confused::confused:

Thanks,
JAckal:cheers:


Jackal, yes that is the controller I was talking about. They make it in 3 versions, the C model is for analog drives and is the cheapest one but its limited to 3 axises. They also make a D model for digital drives which is 4 axis (and cost more) and they also make an S model for stepper motors.

As 3t3D mentioned if you already have analog drives it will be reasonably easy to hook up. If you need new drives the high end approach would be to get the D model. However although
they designate the S model for steppers, I believe it would also work with step/direction based servo drives like Vipers/Geckos/etc. but the pulse rate is probably lower than the D model, which would limit your rapid speeds. But depending on your performance goals, the S model may be good enough and I think its cheaper than the D model, but may also be limited to 3 axises.

The interface issues you will have are in 4 areas- connecting to the drives, connecting to the encoders, connecting to the spindle and connecting to the limit and home switches.

Depending on the encoder types you currently have and the controller you decide to go with you may have to replace your axis encoders, most people get the new ones from US Digital, their prices are pretty reasonable. Connecting the limit/home switches should be pretty straightforward unless they used some oddball design but I would definitely use new wiring there.

I would also definitely go with new motor drive wiring as old flakey wiring causes a lot of hassles for people doing these kinds of upgrades. mcmaster dot com sells special multiconductor wire for CNC use (flexible and oil resistant) by the foot so you don't have to buy a big roll of it. Some people like to use fancy connectors for their motor and encoder connections but as far as I'm concerned every extra connector is just another potential trouble source. I like to wire directly from the drives to the motors and encoders directly using the terminal strips typically supplied on the motors and drives. Its more work if you ever need to swap drives out for testing or something like that, but you really shouldn't have to do that very often.

Hopefully your current spindle drive has inputs to control on/off and forward/reverse as well as a voltage input to set the spindle speed. If so this will be easy to hook up. If it doesn't have these inputs and you want full spindle control, which I recommend, then you would need to buy a new VFD for the spindle.

As far as I know those chinese sold controllers are legit units, and those are pretty killer prices. But even with the Siemens controller you're still looking at a fair amount of work to get the machine shop ready, so think through that issue.

If I was starting from scratch today it would be a tough choice between the Siemens controller and a Mach approach, but if I had the dough available (I didn't at the time) I'd probably look hard at the Haas TM-1 with a tool changer.

Also there has been some other discussion of this controller on PM, if you search "802" you'll probably hit it.

One other issue, all the "hardware accelerators" that have been developed for Mach all make me pretty nervous. They require additional software support beyond even the basic Mach interface and I've seen several of them come on the market with great fanfare but not fully functional software and then fade away a year or two later after never really having all the bugs taken out.
My recommendation would be to only consider a Mach solution that uses the standard parallel port approach, this is the most commonly used version and gives you the best chance of minimizing flakeyness. There are several companies that supply interface cards for this parallel port approach and those cards work fine, the ones I'm saying avoid to are the ones that implement some or all of the motion control also.

Good luck-

Paul T.
www.power-t.com
 
That Siemens looks the best. Affordable & easier to install. It might cost a little more, but less wiring to run down and contend with.

I'll get with Viper and see what he says about his drives compatibility.Those Gecko 320x's look good, if there are some opinions out there on them.

New US encoders will be used on this mill.

Thanks for all of the info.

JAckal:cheers:
 
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Siemens 802S is the cheapest. On Ebay at $2000
It outputs step and direction. You could connect that to a motor drive that supports Step and Direction. Some of the top end drives can be configured for step and direction or slave mode, or other modes.

The 802S does not have encoder inputs except for the spindle.

The 802C will drive the analog inputs to your drives, and uses encoder inputs.

The 802D is getting up there in price, and has digital outputs. You need an extra cost four channel converter if you want to drive analog drives with that.

IIRC it was big jump in price from an 802C to an 802D, and that was without the converter, or the new drives you will need.
 
Siemens 802S is the cheapest. On Ebay at $2000
It outputs step and direction. You could connect that to a motor drive that supports Step and Direction. Some of the top end drives can be configured for step and direction or slave mode, or other modes.

The only issue on the 802S is its maximum pulse output rate. Since its designed for steppers it likely doesn't pulse as fast as the 802D. It would still work with servo step/direction servo drives but this would likely limit your max table speed with the servos to less than they are capable of.

If you have to get new encoders, you can help this situation by getting encoders with a smaller number of "lines" (pulses) per revolution.

Some drives, like the Gecko's, also bandaid this issue by providing an optional "pulse multiplier" that you can set the multiplication factor on. So if you set it to 8, for every single pulse the drive receives it moves the servo 8 "lines" on the encoder.

These always kind of sounded like a kludge to me but I guess there is no reason they wouldn't work ok.

Paul T.
Power Technology
 
One more thought, if you decide to go the Siemens route via Ebay, I'd definitely make a call to Siemens first to find out what the support is going to be like. You likely will hit a few points in the process when some outside advice will save a lot of time, and it would be nice to know up front if you have any access to that if you don't buy the system from one of their authorized re-sellers.

The Mach support is actually pretty good via a couple of forums, you get support both from the developers and other long time users that are pretty experienced in getting Mach set up and running.

Paul T.
Power Technology
 
One more thought, if you decide to go the Siemens route via Ebay, I'd definitely make a call to Siemens first to find out what the support is going to be like. You likely will hit a few points in the process when some outside advice will save a lot of time, and it would be nice to know up front if you have any access to that if you don't buy the system from one of their authorized re-sellers.

Paul T.
Power Technology


+ 2


The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters.
 
I will try to contact Siemens and ask a few question now. Maybe about the drives and encoders, to see how they respond. Plus give a reference to the Ebay listing to see if it is legit ( or if the seller is just saying that Siemens will be glad to help, just to sell his product);).

JAckal:cheers:
 
Jackal, let us know what he says about the Ebay units. At those prices I've been assuming that they're sneaking out at the end of the day with ones that "fell" off the assembly line.

I guess more likely these are units that are intended for sale in China that are being gray marketed here.

Paul T.
Power Technology
 
That Siemens looks the best. Affordable & easier to install. It might cost a little more, but less wiring to run down and contend with.

I'll get with Viper and see what he says about his drives compatibility.Those Gecko 320x's look good, if there are some opinions out there on them.

New US encoders will be used on this mill.

Thanks for all of the info.

JAckal:cheers:

Did you actually read the review of the viper? I think that would be the last one I got. I would really look at the Whale3.

Why not just get the analog seimens control?. It will save you a lot of work and i think it will be a better control. This depends on wether or not the control takes the encoder info on the step/dir version.
 
I've been following some of the retrofit discussions that have occured on here lately because I have a 3 axis mill that I eventually want to retrofit.
I see a lot of discussion about Gecko and viper drives as well as other imported drives like the Whale3 and Dugong.
I have no experience with most of these, but have researched the Geckos. It appears that the Geckos have a very low voltage rating. Would these actually work well on an industrial machine application?
I see the Viper's have a higher voltage rating, but someone above mentioned that they are not reliable.

One avenue that I haven't seen discussed very much are the Mach Motion kits. Has anyone looked into these? Is the cost too high?

I've been on their site a couple times just to see what they offer. I like the fact that they are using more industrial quality drives, such as Mitsubishi and Danaher. They are more expensive, but it appears they would be a more robust solution for an actual industrial machine that is being used on a daily, or near daily basis.

I have no physical experience with any of these drives, other than working with Allen Bradley dives on some industrial equipment (non-machining related). So, I'm really just fishing for some info and opinions for myself, and others that are involved in this thread.

btm
 








 
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