Emco PC turn 55 upgrade..

james-mech wrote: You can find the 5 phase steppers, sure, but not the 5 phase driver cards..

I typed "vexta driver" on eBay and got 884 items. I saw a number of the smaller drives in the
$25 - 40 range.

You will not find any Berger-Lahr stuff, they licensed the patents to Oriental Motor and
stopped producing under their own name, I think.

Jon

Hi Jon,
you are right - thanks. Quite a few possibles there on that search.

Am I right in thinking I can plug one of the vexta drivers into a mesa card combo and go from there?

As a 'for your information' for anybody who comes into the same situation ie wishing to use an older emco PC turn 55 with a modern version of windows and upto date winnc software emco came back to me today after I contacted them. They only want 1900 euros to provide me with a new main controller card that will hook up to windows xp and onwards. Oh and they want 1000 euros to come and plug it in... - not recommended to plug it in yourself, lol... - how reasonable of them!

Looks like that option is out!

thanks, J

james-mech wrote: Hi Jon,
you are right - thanks. Quite a few possibles there on that search.

Am I right in thinking I can plug one of the vexta drivers into a mesa card combo and go from there?


thanks, J

Maybe. Some Super Vexta drives have a 1P/2P switch. One of those positions selects
the two inputs as a move reverse and move forward pulse, the other selects step
and direction. If they don't have a switch or jumper for that, then you need a little
gate circuit to convert step/dir to the 2P mode.

Jon

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

jmelson wrote: Some Super Vexta drives have a 1P/2P switch. One of those positions selects
the two inputs as a move reverse and move forward pulse, the other selects step
and direction. If they don't have a switch or jumper for that, then you need a little
gate circuit to convert step/dir to the 2P mode.

The LinuxCNC software stepgen can do up/down pulse generation (also quadrature and user table). See the step_type modparam)
www.linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/stepgen.9.html
The Mesa card stepgens also support the three 2-pin modes and also (in master) user table-based patterns (see the step_type HAL parameter)
www.linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/hostmot2.9.html#stepgen
I had thought that the Pico cards could do the other step types too.

This seller in China seems to have "More than 10" Vexat drives:

Did some tests with a logic analyser to check what was going on. Mesa card combo should work fine. No need to change drives or driver cards. I will update with details when done...

Cheers,
James

andypugh wrote: I had thought that the Pico cards could do the other step types too.

Nope, the choices are step/direction and quadrature (wave drive) output.
There is also a "Mariss mode" which causes direction to only change immediately before
a step pulse, to accomodate old Gecko pulse multiplier drives such as the
G210.

So, our Universal Stepper Controller does not have the CW/CCW pulse
option.

Jon