I am reviving this old thread because I am in posession of one of these lathes which I am going to attempt a conversion on. While I am generally reasonably technical and comfortable tearing the back panel open and reading documentation, I am not an expert in LinuxCNC nor in motion control in general, so posting here in hopes that others, who know more than I do can help me double check my work before I let the magic smoke out of any of this since after all -as much as I hate the older WinNC software, it is working.
It turns that at some point (my revision is A6P_V01) Emco ditched the 5-phase steppers in favor of 3-phase as can be seen in the electrical documentation (
Scan
)
The motor used for the axis is a VRDM366/50LHA (
PDF
), and the stepper drivers take differential input. (see page 15 of the electrical documentation - first link above).
The spindle is controlled by a Lenze 8202-E vector drive and as others on this forucm have documented it is fitted with an encoder.
My conclusion so far is that I can reuse most of the existing electronics while ripping out the control bits and replacing with Mesa hardware. The turret may be a challenge but at least a couple of people have been able to get it going and there is a Boxford ATC component in the HAL library that should serve as a starting point.
Am I missing anything thus far?
