Retrofitting an Emco turn 320

Hi all,

I got an Emco turn 320 cnc lathe with Siemens Sinumerik 810t controls and Baumüller drives.
Im thinking to retrofit the 810t because it is quite stupid and very slow to program. I have calculated the io requirements: it has about 80 inputs and 33 outputs which includes the encoders. Im thinking in buying Mesa cards: 6i25 and 7i77 and building some shift registers for leds and others. What do you think? It is a good way to start?
I wonder if there is a way to convert the plc program from the siemens (s5) machine to use with linuxcnc? Your feedback is very welcome.

Hello,
The 6i25 (or 5i25) and 7i77 are good choices. Although they do not fulfill your IO requirements.
Start there, where you can see your setup working and afterwards you can acquire another board for more IO.
eusurplus.com (+- me) have stock in Europe for those units.

Hi,

Im aware of Your site, and will buy from you once Im convinced. However you should put some keywords on your site and do some optimization for search engines, as google did not show you in the first 20 hits searching for "mesa card 7i77 5i25 price"


I have preparing a document with plans on upgrade, now the io-port list is nearly complete.

if you separate the servo analog and enables and the encoder inputs
there are 22 outputs and 53 inputs so a 7I77 + a 7I84 should do

Thats 32 outputs and 64 inputs (+6 drive enables + 6 analog outs + 6 encoder inputs)

Is it possible to convert the PLC program or I have to write another one ?

Much likely you will not use 80% of your PLC program as many of the things that you will need will be directly implemented in hal files.
We have retrofitted a few lathes all without ladder, only hal and components.

Im quite convinced that i can go with 7i77 + 7i84 what PCW suggested. What else do i need to get the system going?
After doing all the electronics cabling, what should i do? Write specific hal components to interact with the io modules? Is there a simulator or something out there I should begin with? What should I install besides linuxcnc? How can I program the different logics?

Thanks

Normally you would try to take care of the following:

1) safety
2) make your servos move then tune them.
3) spindle, same as above
4) IO

Point 2 and 3 can require hardware that can be expensive depending on what you actually have now, so those points normally are the most important in terms of cost to the hole system. Point 4, is more effort on the programming, but here on this forum you can have most answers that you may need.

My project stepped to the next level, this week I got the hardware from Eusurplus:
Mesa 6i25 + 7i77 + 7i84

I got a corei 5 desktop with 8Gb ram a Gigabyte h55m motherboard, two 250Gb HDDs setup in mirror. Installed latest 64bit LinuxCNC.
I got a LCD monitor 1280x1024 with a touchscreen, as I would like to use touchy if i could configure this.

My first question is, that the 6i25 comes with an 5i25 firmware, where can I find the firmware to run the card in 6i25? as mesanet only has the 5i25.zip package, containing 5i25 firmwares only.

Mesanet software does not work on amd64 architecture, and it seems that linuxcnc distro somehow not allows me to install i386 multiarch.

My first question is, that the 6i25 comes with an 5i25 firmware, where can I find the firmware to run the card in 6i25? as mesanet only has the 5i25.zip package, containing 5i25 firmwares only.

There's is only a marginal speed improvement by using 6i25 native firmware so 6I25 bitfiles are not built anymore,
they can be built from source, but it not likely to be worth the effort

Mesanet software does not work on amd64 architecture, and it seems that linuxcnc distro somehow not allows me to install i386 multiarch.

Which software does not work? If you require mesaflash its probably best to build from source

As far as LinuxCNC goes, AFAIK there are no RTAI based versions that work with 64 bit OS's

(you _can_ run LinuxCNC master with a Preemt_RT kernel based 64 bit system)