Mitsubishi Meldas TRA 30 and TRA 60

I posted this over at CNCZone already without much success. So I figured I would give the LinuxCNC forum a try. Here is the text I posted.....

I am in the process of Retro fitting an old OKK vertical mill from 1985 according to the book that was with it. I have 3 Mesa cards to work with a 5i24 that is in the linuxcnc box, a 7i37TA that connects to it to break out the I/O and a 7i49 board to grab the resolver data. I'm trying to get one axis going, probably X to start with. On the TRA 30 board their is a connector that says something like ZP1 and from what research I could come up with through google and cnczone that seems to be the connector I should focus alot of my effort on. I found a chart on one of the cnczone posts that showed a TRA 41 pinout which seems to be similar to what I am dealing with on the TRA30. My question is what does LinuxCNC need to connect to inorder to drive those amps and what does LinuxCNC need from the 7i49 resolver board for feedback?

Any hints or tips from anyone who has ventured down a similar path would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Do you have a link to the document with the drive interface pinout?
Drives of that era are likely quite standard velocity mode servos

The LinuxCNC setup for resolvers is basically identical to systems with encoders
if you replace the word "encoder" with "resolver" in the hal file for those axis with resolvers

Here is the link to the post where I found the diagram www.cnczone.com/forums/mazak-mitsubishi-...e-help-please-2.html

One part of me thinks it should be straight forward but I just can't seem to make sense of the diagram and how it could relate to my application. I really appreciate the help and I'm up for learning new things if I have to

If the TRA41 is the same, it looks pretty basic, analog in (ER and ER GND), a drive enable signal to the drive (NC READY), a drive fault signal to the controller (ALARM), tachometer connections left as-is.

If I read the thread correctly, It looks like the drive is enabled by grounding NC READY, and the ALARM polarity can be determined with a voltmeter

All of this can be ( and should be ) checked by hand without any interface hardware

I'm not quite sure on the whether the resolvers are connected to the amps or not, I'm taking it that it does have something connected back to the driver/amp boards.

Thanks PCW for that explanation I think that may have cleared some of my confusion up. I'm going to do as you said and get the old multimeter out. I'll post back with what I figure out if I figure anything out that is lol.

Another question would be does it seem like a reasonable idea to just buy some 8i20 boards and get rid of the old stuff? Or do you think that would be opening up a huge can of worms?

Thanks for the help I clearly need it lol.

What type of motors are used? If they are brushed and the drives work, I would use the old drives

The z motor is a dc permanent magnet motor according to it's tag, I guess where I am stuck is whether I tie into the drive directly or would I have to tie into the old control unit to use them? The drive has like 24 pins and I only need a few of them for linux but can't seem to figure out where they would need to be terminated, I think I am just all turned around and over thinking this but maybe not.

I have seen mention of tach generators in the manual for the tra 30 but I don't see anything out of the ordinary on the servos themselves. It could be that I just don't know what a tach looks like lol.