Pete's Cincinatti Arrow 500 Retrofit...

Andy,
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Honestly the 7i77 manual I did read and knew about how the inputs have the ability to monitor and the spindle drive does have the capacity to output that information as far as I can tell. What I am not clear on is how to set up that so LinuxCNC can show that on a meter of some kind on-screen.

The counters were not associated with the toolchanger as far as I can tell basically everytime a tool number was in the spindle its associated counter would count up one. Whether or not that is saved after a power down is not exactly that important as I could record that information before I shut down each day.

The air input would certainly need to ensure any toolchanger action did not occur and other than that it is unnecessary to estop the machine I agree in a low air pressure situation but I am up in the air about HOW BEST to use the signal and what can LinuxCNC do to alert the operator in this instance. Again this is my first time with LinuxCNC so I am unsure about all of the available features especially those that must be hand programmed outside of PNCConf. Peace

Pete

Bigjohn,
Thanks for the suggestions. Honestly the whole ladder toolchanger programming is fairly daunting for me and I have a lot to learn about it before I tackle any of that stuff. Basically my plan is to get the three axes,limits and homes,and the spindle working without feedback initially. Then once that is proven to work I will add my spindle encoder and see about rigid tapping. Once that works I will get spindle orientation working and finally add the toolchanger components into the mix. I can certainly add the pressure input at that time but I would prefer to add it in somewhere else so that it works when I am not using the toolchanger setup.

All of the screen customization stuff is kinda Chinese arithmetic to me right now
I thank God for my friend Billy who is a veritable whiz with that sort of stuff. He probably can help me get the buttons and meters insitituted and linked in the software. Still lots to do here but I am really excited about seeing axes moving on this machine as it has been a good while since that happened LOL peace

Pete

Andy,
That all sounds good as long as it is more than just an on-screen alert and that it actually somehow stops events in the program to ensure nothing terrible happens LOL. The spindle load meter is extremely useful in a VMC for monitoring cutter wear as well as other things.

As far as interface goes not sure I understand your question. I was just going to use the main axis screen with the glade panel unless the toolchanger setup necessitates another kind of GIU....

Pete

John,
So I can run this on the machine without actually running the machine right. The sample configs do not turn on or affect the real tike stuff right. That CL turret is for a lathe or a mill? Is it for a rotary carousel toolchanger like my Cincinnati Arrow has? The ladder logic is kinda complex as far as I can tell but I have only just looked inti it recently. All I know from speaking with a couple folks who have gotten this kind of toolchanger to work is that you must monitor the positive and negative of every event in the sequence to ensure safety. IE when the tool turret is moved into the position under the spindle you are not only monitoring the sensor that says it is there but also the sensor in the park position to see that it is not parked in case of a sensor malfunction. Also as you said the timing of everything is critical and timeouts are a must for each events. Really just trying to wrap my head around the basics of the ladder PLC setup right now tho. Peace

Pete

As far as measuring spindle load goes, there are a at least 2 schemes possible
without adding any hardware:

1. Use the spindle drives analog output to indicate load current, This analog output can be
read by one of the 7I77s inputs. (4 of the 7I77s inputs can be used for analog sensing)
The 7I77 analog inputs are only 8 bit and have a 33V range so the 0 --> 10V signal will only have
about 80 steps.

2. Run the spindle drive in torque mode, which in turn requires setting up a PID loop for spindle
velocity control. When this is done, the PID output is a torque command so can be used
(after lowpass filtering) as the load indication

John,
Okay man that is what I figured, I will download and install that sim and run it to see what gives. It is nice to have something to base my setup on. The Ladder setup does look intimidating but I suppose it will be simple once I get into it.

Pete,
That is what I was hoping for. I will have encoder feedback for spindle control in a bit here actually just this morning I took apart the resolver atop the spindle motor and I am removing it looking at encoder options for a new install. Looks pretty straightforward here and i hope to be able to get the same setup and encoder working as my friend Lee has on his Cincinatti arrow. I would rather use the first option assuming it is accurate. When you say 80 steps does that mean that any resultant bar graph style output will have 80 possible divisions to show load from min to max? Ifso that should be more than adequate I should think. The Hitachi apparently does have analog output and I will check into that here in a bit. It would be nice just to be able to hookup just two wires into the control and be up and running. I am very impressed with your 5i25,7i77 Combo so far it is working exceedingly well and is super simple to configure so far. It also appears at least at this point that it will run the entire machine without need for any further cards for additional I/O. I'll check which pins are the load metering sort in the manual when I get to it here. Todays goals are to get the resolver to encoder setup sorted and order the encoder and to machine the solder adapters for the Y axis motor pins so that I can get this motor shoehorned into the space below the column. Then I can finally install all three motors onto the machine and start doing the final PID loop setup. Things should be getting real interesting here soon. The bench test went very well.

I am however experiencing an odd issue. When I hooked up the MPG wheel to my machine I set it up in single ended mode and set the mesa card to input single ended MPG on axis four. The Encoder worked fine after Billy helped me get it configured in the software. However playing with it yesterday I noticed that occasionally when you bump the MPG one position at a time the motor will only jerk a little instead of positioning to the next division. It would do this in several different division modes and also on all three motors. I am wondering if it is my MPG has a problem or perhaps my wiring is wrong, perhaps it would work better in differential mode. I only set it up that way because I did not have a shielded cable long enough with enough conductors to hookup in differential mode. Any ideas how to figure this one out. Is it possible that with our preliminary and most likely grossly wrong PID setup here that is causing the problem? Perhaps I should not worry about it until I get the motors in the machine and finalize the PID tuning? Peace

Pete