Emcoturn 120 lathe retrofit

Todd Zuercher wrote: For little more than your C32 board you could get a mesa 7i76E, and eliminate items 2,3 and 4 from your shopping list. (it is the breakout, spindle encoder counter, vfd control, and hardware step-generator, all in one.

But if you already have your heart set on, or already have that other stuff a configuration could probably be put together that could directly replace a smoothstepper using a 7i92.

One benifit of using Linuxcnc over Mach might be that Linuxcnc can generate other step output paterns than just step/dir. CW/CCW and quadrature as well as a few more obscure options are available. (I think those vexta drives may use CW/CCW.)

Im liking the Mesa 7i76e ethernet i/o board. If I were to go that route I could keep the dell fx170 thinclient, would I need any other boards with this as it is also cheaper than the pci io and 2 daughter cards from mesa.

LutzTD wrote: Im liking the Mesa 7i76e ethernet i/o board. If I were to go that route I could keep the dell fx170 thinclient, would I need any other boards with this as it is also cheaper than the pci io and 2 daughter cards from mesa.

You might need a USB Network dongle of some sort, the 7i76 will occupy the only ethernet port. However, you should have more than enough stepgens and GPIO for the lathe on the 7i76, and I would expect that the spindle interface can operate the spindle.

There seems to be a fairly low size limitation on files posted here in the forum. So at the link below are various EMCOTurn 120P documents I have accumulated from various places. My Linuxcnc configuration files are also posted there (in the file EMCOTurn120P-ConfigFiles.zip) as well as a user manual for the Vexta UDX5128NA stepper drives and some Rohm collet closer info.

There is some good information on the 120P in the Yahoo Group emco_turn_120 ( groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/emco_turn_120/info ) and some of this info came from the files people have posted there. There is also helpful info at: emcocncretrofits.wikia.com/wiki/Emco_CNC_Retrofits_Wiki , as well as www.cnczone.com/forums/emco-lathe/ Photos of my retrofit machine can be seen here: flic.kr/s/aHsk92oxWz

-Tom

bgp.nu/~tom/pub/EMCOTurn120P/

andypugh wrote:

LutzTD wrote: Im liking the Mesa 7i76e ethernet i/o board. If I were to go that route I could keep the dell fx170 thinclient, would I need any other boards with this as it is also cheaper than the pci io and 2 daughter cards from mesa.

You might need a USB Network dongle of some sort, the 7i76 will occupy the only ethernet port. However, you should have more than enough stepgens and GPIO for the lathe on the 7i76, and I would expect that the spindle interface can operate the spindle.

The 7i76e does indeed look like a nice solution! Looks like it may have everything you need. As Andy says, you can get your networking off a USB dongle, connect the other usb port to a hub or the Toolerator directly.

I use a serial port off my Atom board to talk Modbus to my VFD. I don't see a serial port on the Dell...Andy: How would he drive the VFD?

PS: Has anyone tested the Dell he's using for latency? With the Mesa card it becomes less important since he only needs a relatively slow thread, but still...

-Tom

tome wrote: I use a serial port off my Atom board to talk Modbus to my VFD. I don't see a serial port on the Dell...Andy: How would he drive the VFD?

Analogue voltage works well, the 7i76 has a digital potentiometer and fwd/ev/enable outputs.

Alternatively a USB modbus dongle will work.

the FX170 has 4 usb 2.0 ports so I should be ok there. Im not really too worried about WAN, so I could leave that out. Just about as easy to load gcode with a usb dongle. If it becomes tiring I could use a usb network card. Or could I put an old router and then drive the 7i76e through the router? seems like it would slow it down but I dont know.

I was thinking the variable voltage output for the spindle would be all that was required for the vfd.