Brother TC-225 / TC-229 adventure!

Hi Ihavenofish!
actually I have Brother TC-215 with original Toshiba servo drives...and I manage to retrofit it ONLY with pin-to-pin replacement NC-Board with Mesa 7i92 and 7i77. It's work incredibly precice (I think due internal resolver) (precise is about 0.002mm)

first chips

So if your drives and motors initially work fine, I hope You can do the same and save cost and time.

Ready to share all info with all comunity.

About toolchange..... it takes most of my efforts.

Would like to say many thanks for laserK3000/tc215Retrofit github link

There are 2 main important part.
1. Spindle orientation with m19... rotate spindle and bt30 to mach the ATC fixture.
this done with .hal orient and finaly work perfect!

2. M6 gcode substitute script....is:
1. check index enable
2. check z location ( if z>0 not safe to rotate spindle!)
3. extend z softlimits (+150 - -200)
4. orient spindle with m19
5. move spindle to Z (+150) (ATC Home switch)
6. check atc home switch is on (safe place to rotate atc toolcrib)
7. determine nearest path and direction to rotate toolcrib.
8. read ATC encoder and control ATC motor (to drive to destination pochet)
9. move Z to 0
10. limit back softlimits to (0 - -200)

Script with a lot of debug messages attached.

video about toolchange script testing

video abou softlimits change

Thanks

If you go earlier in this thread, youll find that the original sanyo motors could not be tuned. perhaps the Toshibas behave much better.

On my TC229, the drives are proprietary serial, (and mine were dead anyway), so there was no using those.

Oh, thanks for the orientation notes. I'll have to check into it. It's not going to allow the all in one motion, but it will work to start by the look of what you did

Poked at the brother in storage today. Turns out that the spindle motors on both machine have the same flange - some reason i thought the tc229 was bigger. both are 150mm. I assume the shafts will end up the same too. No adapters to make.

1 small step closer.

ihavenofish wrote: 2: To rmu, sadly, you wont be using the stock servo axis drives. as you may have seen from earlier in this thread, they really just cant be tuned (under linuxcnc anyway). you can buy new drives and keep the motors I expect, but, delta for example makes top end kits that sell for less than many other peoples drives alone.

That remains to be seen. Somehow the original control gets them to cooperate, and there can't be anything really fancy involved (because of very limited compute power of the 8086/8087 pair).

Alternatively I could try hooking them up to STMBLs.

Unfortunately I can't devote much time to this project at the moment.