Deckel FP5 Gearbox Comp

chili023 has graciously agreed to helping me develop a working gearbox comp for the FP5 machine.

The  system is based on a 6 speed gearbox with 2 shifter motors that drive the gearsets
One shifts:
High Neutral Low speed
and the other:
Low Medium High

The original spindle drive was variable speed DC and will be replaced with a AC servo VFD.

Attached are the wiring diagrams for the FP5 as well as chili023 gearbox Comp.
 



 

The existing 7kw DC spindle motor died. You are correct though, I do not need a servo drive for the motor and hope to find a good solution for adding an encoder somewhere on the final output shaft of the geartrain. The FP5 was variable speed so I am hoping we can develop logic to be able to select a gear with speed range near  the 'center' of the programmed speed  and then be able to adjust spindle speed as necessary while staying in that gear.

Info note: I now have my retrofit VFD properly driving the Yaskawa spindle motor. The original Deckel gear shift routine appears to work with the retrofit 90% of the time. I wanted to ensure that I had a working spindle drive solution before beginning a retrofit.
I am now confident the LCNC conversion can be finished without any major problems.
The final hurdle will be the gear switch .comp
For those who are willing to help me modify it to my FP5, what additional info beyond what I have posted above will you need.

Again, thank everyone for their help to this point.

Erik Green

I have an FP2 NC retrofitted . The gearbox was handled in ladder logic and works just fine . Since you're using a VFD, I've had good result whith enabling the drive in jog at about 5 Hz or slower . that makes shifting smooth . That said I believe the FP2 is a bit different than the 5 in that it has three shifter motors . But that can be simply deleted from the ladder .
Attached you'll find the complete configuration of my machine .
You can use that as a reference .
I should point out that your machine will probably need heidenhein EXE for each linear scale .
That was initially handled inside the deckel dialog CNC, now that's gone you'll need something to take the 64uA(yes micro amps) the scale gives out and turn it to 5V level for the mesa hardware . I tried building my own pcb for this but ended up just buing the right stuff . Incredibly suceptible to noise . Read the EXE manual carefully . You'll find settings to increase the scale resolution down to 0.001mm .
Good luck with that retrofit .

Thanks for the info Niko. I will try to look at your files and see if my feeble mind can wrap around the logic.........
I already have the Heidenhain EXE's. Picked up some EXE610c units same pinout and pin compatible with the installed scales. The FP5 already runs at 1 micron (.001mm) resolution. The 610c units allows both X5 and X10 interpolation so I can run at .0005mm. Do not really expects the accuracy to be any better but at the slower speed these giant machines run at I should not have to worry about missing pulses and might as well use the extra resolution. I hope it might improve the positioning accuracy when using the MPG.

Just to save you some time .
The rotary switch is sent to the tumbler_decode component which holds the look up table for speeds and gearbox fork positions . That would've been unpleasant in ladder . After the desired fork positions are defined and run spindle given the PLC selects the right gear . Actual fork position is given in the nets named gear-block1/2/3-back/mid/front the desired are named block1/2/3-back/mid/front-in . Ladder inside is pretty straightforward . Spindle jerk is pulsed(motor started through resistors) to match the gear teeth, but in your case it'll just be jog from the drive . That way you don't have to multiplex drive enable and analog values .

Are you using the original Deckel control console? Did you swap out the spindle speed rotary switch, rewire it or is it already set up to be de-muxed?

The machine was delivered to me without the operator panel . Just the cable sticking out . I designed a similar one which acommodates the PC and some of the mesa boards . The switch I put in has 23 positions which are converted to a 5 bit binary number on a seperate board . Would be absolutely wasteful to use 23 digital inputs .