Analogue inputs on Motenc boards

Please excuse my ignorance, I'm new to EMC at present and its a steep learning curve!!!

I'm just trying to choose a motion control board for my Hurco vmc retrofit. It'll be a five axis machine and I'm choosing between 2x Mesa 5i20's, a Mesa 5i22, 2x Motenc lites or a Motenc 100.

My question is that I see some versions of Motencs boards have some 16bit analogue inputs. Can I configure these to take potentiometers for feed and speed overide? I'd prefer pots to encoders for this as I'm used to heidenhain controls and like to have a physical stop at 0 feed and not have to glance up at the control to see where the feed rate's set at.

Any thoughts? Any other ways to achieve the same thing?

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

Phil

BigJohnT wrote:

Phil,

I don't know anything about the Montec boards but with the Mesa boards the 5i20 is all you need for EMC. Depending on your I/O requirements you can have a 7i33 for 4 servo drives with encoder feedback and two 7i37's with 8 out and 16 in for each 5i20 board. I'm setting up a Hardinge lathe with that setup atm. My feed override is a bcd rotary switch with a positive stop at 0 and at 120. The output is basically 0 through 12 so it only requires 4 inputs with a weigh of 1, 2, 4 and 8 to work with weighted_sum to output the 0 - 120 to the proper HAL pin.

The learning gets easier the more you know...

John

Thanks for the reply, I'll be needing 2 of the 5i20's though won't I? I have 5 ac servo powered axis ( x y z a b) plus an AC servo on the spindle ,a 30 station toolchange, spindle chiller, flood and through spindle coolant.

The 5i20's are my first choice and I will start with one to get the x,y and z moving and the estop circuitry and spindle, then add all the extra functionality as individual projects one at a time. There's nothing like jumping in at the deeep end I guess!!!

Cheers
Phil

Hi John
The axis motors are AC yaskawa 2.2kw servos with several analogue input options to the drives, + or - 10v being one of them,they have resolvers on the motors back to the drives and 2500 line quad encoders on each leadscrew back to the control to close the feedback loop, the main spindle is a 20hp AC servo with analogue input into the drive but with only a resolver back to the drive and no encoder to the control, I think this can then be treated much like an inverter. The 4th and 5th axis are as per the x,y and z but I'll have to change the encoders to some quadrature types.
It looks like I'll be ordering up some mesa hardware over the weekend.
Cheers for the help
Phil

The 7I48 is not currently supported by the HostMot2 driver (the PWMs would work but the encoder counter is of a different type).
It would be possible to make an experimental bitfile to allow the current driver to work with the 7I48 but it would be
pretty kludgey