Retrofitting a 1986 Maho MH400E

Thanks for the sanity check Tommy.

You are welcomed . Always.

This weekend was spent doing some initial testing of the the gearbox.comp, simulator and sim.gui written by my friend.

Source code for MAHO gearbox comp

Sergey has been a champion, as he had to edit parts of the code when it turned out LinuxCNC only accepted the C90 flavour of C, whereas he had used the C99 version. A special thank you also to Andy Pugh for supporting Sergey on IRC with some of our questions.



We could have got more done if I was more versed in linux commands, but Sergey has been patiently navigating me through it all.
First we tested the feedback from the the gearbox shifter cam's, to ensure that the comp has mapped the bit mask to the correct speeds.

Then we tested the control of the twitching relays which intermittantly power the main spindle with 90VAC during the change, to prevent binding. The relay control works correctly, but, I missed a point in the specification. It looks like we need to energise the gearbox start relay 11K8 to allow twitching power to the spindle.

The next step will be manually placing the gear shafts to the mid (blue) position, and then giving speed commands which move a stage to one of the end positions, and ensureing that the use of the reversing relay is a correct.

The keyboard is sitting on brackets I had lasered, which are easily removable. In my mind, once the machine is finished, no keyboard should be necessary.
Mark

You could have the keyboard on hinges, so it folds away upside-down under the cabinet. (so the swarf fall out rather than in).

Even on my working machines I occasionally want a keyboard, to open a halmeter or rename a file, that sort of thing. On the mill I have one of these in a holster on the side of the cabinet.

These logitech USB keyboards are really convenient. It has stowage for it's usb blue tooth(?) adapter, in the battery compartment, weighs little and has worked flawlessly with LinuxCNC /debian.

Under the user module won't work as the support arm comes in the bottom, but I will always be handy close by the mill.
Mark

WooHooo!!!!!



I'd messed up the spec, reversing CW and CCW, so Sergey had to change the code a bit, but once it re-complied it is working perfectly. The next step will be getting it integrated into the HAL and seeing if there is any screwy behaviour to deal with from the speed input in gmoccapy, mdi, or gcode.

It was compiled with:
I added... ...to the machine.hal, but it errors on start up that it cant find mh400e_gearbox, although the .ko file was created. Any suggestions what I messed up there?
Mark