Emco PC turn 55 upgrade..

Step one - get rid of the old electronics and start new?

All depends how much money you have to throw at it.

If I were you I would try to do what skunkworks did with the Emco 5.
The trouble with Emco is that they are all proprietary boards, 4 phase unipolar steppers etc.
If you don't use their drivers and motors, you pretty much strip out everything and start again, with all the associated cost.

I did something similar with a Boxford lathe, located the step / dir connections, limits, home switches etc and wired up to a BOB and drove from Linuxcnc. That was more straight forward because they were bipolar motors, but Linuxcnc can drive unipolars and I would be amazed if the settings skunkworks ended on do not work with yours.

If you cannot do that, all you have spent out on is a BOB you may need anyway.

Second choice, I also would go for powerfull steppers with a high voltage PSU and drivers over small servos.
Less cost and complexity and probably better suited to the machine.

Try contacting Sam directly, I am sure he will help if your stuff looks similar to his

regards

Hi Arceye!
Unfortunately the boards are completely different. The motors are 5 phase.
Think i might have to swap them and the controller boards out!

Any recommendations for good brand nema 23 stepper motors that i can drive
With (is it?) the mesa card combo?

Thanks, J

Mech john wrote: Hi Arceye!
Unfortunately the boards are completely different. The motors are 5 phase.
Think i might have to swap them and the controller boards out!

Any recommendations for good brand nema 23 stepper motors that i can drive
With (is it?) the mesa card combo?

Thanks, J

Due to patent/licensing issues, only a couple companies were permitted to make
5-phase motors and drives. That would be Berger-Lahr and Oriental Motor/Vexta.
See if there are some super Vexta driver boards in there. These can usually
be configured to take step/dir, although some versions only take step up/step down
pulses. A simple device can convert step/dir to step up/step down if needed.
5 phase steppers are actually QUITE amazing, and outperform most 2-phase
stepper motors by quite a bit, both in power vs. speed and in much less
resonance trouble.

Jon

Hi Jon,
thanks for the info. I did a bit more reading and you are quite right. The 5-phase steppers should work well. Seems a shame to swap them out. I also looked more at the control boards in the machine. It is all quite well made but emco specific. There are a couple of programmable memory chips on the stepper driver board, the main control board has 3 or 4 xylinx chips on it and their is a vfd board for the motor and encoder - much more sophisticated than the emc compact 5 machine boards and all driven with emco logic, it would take some work to reverse engineer this although I am sure it is possible. Communication with the pc is via an RS422 pci card which communicates with the winnc software. I called the emco company and there is a software 'upgrade' available. When I get this info for interest I will post it up. The other alternative if I was to keep the existing motors would be to purchase Berger Lahr d450 stepper driver cards (I or 2, I have not examined this in detail) I am thinking I could use these to communicate with the steppers and hook them into the mesa card - however they are not cheap....

I wait for emco to come back to me with the software upgrade price - that will be the first step in the decision process and hopefully of use to someone else.

cheers! J

[quote="james-mech" post=43914The other alternative if I was to keep the existing motors would be to purchase Berger Lahr d450 stepper driver cards (I or 2, I have not examined this in detail) I am thinking I could use these to communicate with the steppers and hook them into the mesa card - however they are not cheap....
[/quote]
You can often find Vexta 5-phase stepper drivers on eBay for about $20, last time I looked
(which was a while ago).

Jon

You can find the 5 phase steppers, sure, but not the 5 phase driver cards..