Light Machine Corp. Benchman XTr (retrofit)

Holy cow!!!! Kflop/Kannalog have already replied shipping! I mean Seriously... compared to Mesa... who didn't even grant me the courteous of telling me it might be awhile before shipping.... I have to say, it is inexcusable. Fine... I am a peon user... I only want one board... so I am treated as an ugly stepchild... the OEMs are given priority... Look... there is NO excuse for not delivering an email explaining the delay. I'm sorry... I am P.O.'d... and I think reasonably so. This is not the outcome I wanted... but I am not ready to excuse the unprofessional manner in which this was handled... I feel mislead by the posts on this forum that touted the virtues of the Mesa... The bottom line is that an unavailable board is as good as non existent and as far as the closed loop... it is also non existent... I'm sorry, but I needed this in a timely manner and I feel the site that showed these boards as available completely misrepresented the truth. When a website shows an "availability" I would hope I could depend on that. I feel foolish. I should have remembered that anything that can go wrong will.... So... I will proceed with a less than ideal solution, but I prefer that than relying on a non available solution. Forgive me but I AM PO'd!

steve_a wrote: I feel mislead by the posts on this forum that touted the virtues of the Mesa

I am starting to feel bad for recommending them too.

The Mesa boards are excellent, but if they are not shipping them then, as you say, they might as well not exist.

Eusurplus (in Portugal) do have stock and do ship promptly.

your not the only one Andy ,

Ok I have made many hard decisions and the hardest is to abandon the servo motor power supply. I labeled all my connectors on the two boards sandwiched on the left side and went to town with a meter. The output from the toroid /choke goes to the bottom board where the two big caps and resistors finish the smoothing. It is then distributed to the motor controllers. I decided I didn't want to make a board to finish off the regulation and opted just to order a 72V unregulated PS from CNC4PC. Yep, a $200 decision. However I have used one of these supplies before on another project and I feel confident it will do the job and save me the time (and worry) of producing the board for the resistors and caps. I also noticed that there is a transistor on the bottom board that taps into the power supply... Could just be for a power supply valid signal of it might power something else. Anyway, that was pretty much the last straw for me... I am already behind and I don't plan to spend time chasing traces. I think MAC might have some way of using the installed toroids but as I just made a personal decision and chickened out.
I also need a 5V and 24V power supply. I know the door and air control solenoids use 24V and I think the motor brakes are 24V. I will need 5V for the logic systems. I also plan to tear out the solenoid logic board and probably replace it with something like an Arduino or a Rasberry PI. I MIGHT still use the 24V supply. Last time I powered stuff up it worked... but it depends on what I see as control for it but I think it is self contained and will still be useful as a supply. I did a quick look at digi-key power supplies. If I can get a 24V for $25 or so I might just replace that just for ease of wiring, besides, my original idea for this machine was to gut the controls and give it a fresh start so I'm kind of returning to Plan A.
For safety control I ordered a solid state, zero cross relay so I can delay the servo motor supply from powering up until I have valid control signals. I believe this is what the relay on the bottom board did so I'm just duplicating that idea.
Christmas break coming up, so this is a good time to order supplies and hit this again in the new year!

No eBay APP ID and/or Cert ID defined in Kunena configuration

steve_a wrote: I also need a 5V and 24V power supply. I know the door and air control solenoids use 24V and I think the motor brakes are 24V. I will need 5V for the logic systems.

Once you have one DC supply the most expedient (and easy to debug) way to get the other DC voltages is with the LED display DC-DC converters that you can find on eBay:


As an example of what I mean. There are higher-current ones, and also step-up varieties.

Does anyone know if the brakes on the motors are just to hold the motors when the machine is powered off or are they supposed to be engaged to hold position while cutting when there is not supposed to be movement in that axis? Seems like a waste to just have brakes to prevent movement when the machine is off.... might make sense to have a more complex role as a dynamic hold for added rigidity.