Bridgeport Boss 9 R2E4 convertion

Wyliest wrote: My concern was the limited number of IO of the 5i25 at only 34 vs the 5i23 with 72. This is not going to be a limiting factor?

How much I/O do you need on a knee mill with no tool changer?

JT

I am putting a DC motor on the knee for raising and lowering the table.
That's one I'd highly recommevd.

I am putting a DC motor on the knee for raising and lowering the table.
That's one I'd highly recommevd.

I was planning on doing this after the conversion is finished. Are you talking about just a manually controlled motor for just raising and lowering the knee or putting it on the controller and making it its own axis?

How much I/O do you need on a knee mill with no tool changer?

To be 100% honest I don't know exactly how much IO I need for this machine, but I would like to not run out. That said I was hoping to make all the button and wheels on the front of the machine functional. Also I have a 6 axis pendent that I would like to use, and other functions like automatic oilier, coolant liquid and mist, compressed air blast, and so on.

Wyliest wrote: To be 100% honest I don't know exactly how much IO I need for this machine, but I would like to not run out. That said I was hoping to make all the button and wheels on the front of the machine functional..

A 7i73 connected to the smart-serial port on the 7i77 is a good way to do this. it supports matrix-wired keyboards/buttons and has on-board encoder counting. It is also quite cheap.
Note that the buttons don't need to be physically in a matrix to be wired that way.

With a 5i25 and 7i77 you would be fine for that conversion. If by chance you run out, you could always add one 7i84 which would give you 32 more inputs and 16 more outputs. i am running my whole VMC on those three boards and that is with an ATC,
hydraulic pump, conveyor and a contol panel full of bttons and lites.

I just finished building the PC with parts I had laying around and a 6i25 and a 7i77. The basic spec are 2GB of DDR, 32GB SSD, dual code AMD, a cheap nvidia graphics, 2 parallel port cards, and the 6i25. I hope to make some major progress over my spring break this week.

bevins wrote: I just converted it from 480 3 phase to single phase and added a vfd.

What did you do for this conversion? Just the VFD or ...? How did you handle the servo power supply

bevins wrote: Let me know if you need schematics. I have them all for the machine. Biggest issue is replacing the EAF board, which handles the I/O (PLC) portion.

I could use the schematics very much. I have read that the EAF board can be a problem, what is the work around? Can its functions be handles directly by the 7i77 or do I need some additional circuitry?

Thanks for the help!