Hurco BMC 20 Ultimax 3 Retrofit

I am going to pick up the machine on Thursday

It has Yasakawa CACR-SR10BB1BF-H servo drives in it. From what I have gathered these are analog servo drives.

If I went with Mesa, the 7i77 and 5i25 looks like it will do the trick.

Got the machine home. When it was powered yesterday it appears that the controller lost all the parameters. It's a ultimax3 control on there now. At least I have all the books, discs, drawings that are supposed to be with the machine. I guess it's time to start cleaning it up and figure out what I need hardware wise to get it going again.

This machine looks pretty mechanically sound. I think its just the controls that are the problem child. The hour meter on it shows 35k hours. But I think these are power on hours, it does not look like it has that many hours on it. The Y box ways look like there in really good shape. I should have it off the trailer tomorrow, then I will start digging through the drawings and see if I can get a better grasp on what I need for conversion parts. This is marked as a 480V machine. There is a transformer hanging on the side of the machine. I am hoping that everything goes through the TX and I can just bypass it so I dont have to go buy a TX.

Have you done any retrofits with the ultimax control?

Here are some drawings for it,

From what I gather the CPU will be replaced with the new PC, The 7I77 will replace the DC I/O and the MP3 card and the 5I25 will interface between the PC and the 7I77. I went ahead and ordered the 5i25 and 7i77

Machine is sitting in the shop now. Just have to move my lathe and mill to get it where I want it.


It also looks like the pendant is just a mix of analog and digital signals so hopefully I will get that all to work also!

The encoders on the servos just feedback to the servo drives, while the axis encoders feedback for actual position

2015-12-05_09-23-25 by Jake Freese , on Flickr

2015-12-05_09-23-13 by Jake Freese , on Flickr

Made a little headway!

LInuxCNC is installed on the PC, initial latency test is not looking good though. Half my video card fan is missing so I am going to go ahead and get a new video card for it, so I need to do some research on the most ideal video card for it.

Its all on a Dell Studio 540 I thought it was a Intel core 2 quad, with a ATI HD4350 video card. Hopefully hardware will be here at the end of the week! Onto the reducing latency battle.

When I would open LCNC I would click on the configuration adviser, I could choose many of the setups in the top section that were axis, or medium and it would open and work. But I I went down to "by configuration" and chose the Pico PPMC, it would throw out an error and quit.

Yeah I ended up with the Pico gear, I have a narrow window to get the majority of this knocked out. Jon was able to get the hardware enroute very quickly, the Pico PPMC seems more like a complete package, plus I like the card cage. I did not have the hardware connected yet, its supposed to be here late this week. That would explain why it was not happy with it.

I am running power to it, and cleaning this week. I am thinking about running a separate 240v single phase circuit to the control transformer so I can have control power all the time as the 3 phase is off a phase converter. Then I can have the controls powered without having the phase converter running.

I have power and air to the machine now, I have been going through trying to see how I can interface with the CRP3 board to keep it, as it has all the relaying on it for coolant, tool changer, lube system....

Latency on the PC I was attempting to use looks like it may be a problem.

Dell Studio 540, Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66 GHz
ATI HD3450 video card.

Servo 1021419, 173278
Base 52365, 27403

I disabled the onboard audio with no improvement. I am going to keep digging through the Wiki to see if there is something else I need to try, or if I need to look into another PC solution. From looking at the latency stats it seems as there is something with Dell machines and the servo max jitter, as many of them are very high or un-useable.

I made some headway today!

Encoders are hooked up, I ended up pulling out all of the old control. I was hoping to use the control relay panel, but it's been repaired and or modified a couple times so it appeared that it was going to be a headache to deal with.

I'm going to get my analog servo signals hooked up, and see what else I need to get going to get basic motion.

How many of y'all are using the servo torque monitors or load meters? It appears mine are both analog signals.

There are some items items like orient complete, orient command, ( assuming these are associated with tool changes). It looks like it calls for the commands and confirms it's there.

The low speed winding select and winding select, I need to research the speed ranges to see when it's supposed to be where.

I'll need at least 1 more I/O board as there are 20 inputs I have found so far. 10 control contacts and 10 more current carrying contacts.