New Project questions

I have a Cincinnati Milacron turning center actually have 7 of them. I have been lurking on this site for a few weeks and am ready to pull a control off and tackle a retrofit using EMC. I am a machinist and thats it, but I think in time i can learn how to put this into operation with this system. I am ready to start ordering have been on the Mesa site and this is what I have come up with. Any input would be helpful.

1 Piece 5I22
1 Piece 7I33TA
3 Pieces 7I37TA

There are 26 limit switches on this machine alone. Tool turret, swing-up tail stock, travel ect........The bottom line is I need a lot of I/O. I would like a few opinions before I order.

Thank you

Thank you for the feedback. The electronics are some what of a mystery but after reading the manuals and looking on the forums I am starting to learn to crawl. Yes, I am trying to use the existing axis and spindle drives with the encoder feedback. The main thing is I have 9 employees and this needs to be safe and run kind of like it did before the retrofit thus the need for all of the i/o. Two speed gear box, hydraulic chuck ans all of the safety features built into a OEM machine. I am still trying to figure out if this set-up has enough i/o.

That leads me to ask another question. How would I get more I/o than this set-up?

Does the EMC config lend itself any better to the Mesa or Pico Systems hardware? Is one any more user friendly than the other. What about support from the vendors themselves?

SRT wrote:

Does the EMC config lend itself any better to the Mesa or Pico Systems hardware? Is one any more user friendly than the other. What about support from the vendors themselves?

They are similar in the way EMC supports the hardware. There are different philosophies
on the two systems. The Pico scheme is very fixed, ie. each board does it's specific
function (encoder input, analog output, digital I/O). Also, everything you need is ON
the boards, there are no cables, breakout boards, adapters, etc. needed. So, the
digital I/O board does not use external IO mounting panels, the inputs are on the
board, and there are positions for 8 solid state relays to mount directly on the board.

The Mesa way, if I can be so bold as to explain my competitor's product, is to have
one master board which can be software-configured to do almost any combination
of functions, and then you add adapter boards to set it up for specific functions.

So, I think the Mesa is a bit more flexible, but may be a bit harder to configure
due to all the possible options.

I support the PPMC users as well as I can. I'm going out to a customer's
site tomorrow to advise on first startup of the system. (I usually can't
do that due to distance, but this one is fairly close.) I only support EMC
on my hardware, I think Mesa mostly supports other motion-control
software.

And, of course, you need to take anything I say with a grain of salt, not so
much that I'm pushing my own product but maybe that it is all so familiar
to me that it seems simple. I do have some schematics online and am glad
to consult on any questions that come up.

Jon

Thanks Jon your product does seem a bit more straight forward to me the more I research and learn. I do believe my problem is the input. It will need a 60 Inputs and 20 Outputs to keep this machine fairly close to operating the OEM way. This machine has 76 DC inputs and 33 Outputs before reto-fit.