7i96 Spindle Wiring

tommylight wrote:

Dang that is old, there is an Intel 386EX processor in it ! That was 1991 or 2 !
The easiest way, ditch everything, get 3 drives, even the cheap 10 $ ones will do, just avoid TB6560 something something. TB6600 will do, although 90% of claimed TB6600 on the net are not TB6600, they are TB something 109, and they are good, they can do 3 to 3.5A, so plenty for your machine. The spindle controll through an "arduino" relay for 2 to 4$ and that would be it.
Oh, and a PC with parallel port.

How many wires go to the spindle ?

8 wires ?
That is strange, or not.
Hold on a bit, that relay might not work, we have to figure out what those wires do first.
More pictures, of the motor, motor wires coming out of the motor and motor wires connected to the control board.
I did notice something on the picture of the spindle control that pointed me to the spindle not being a simple DC motor.

Edit,
hmmm..... i quoted myself ... !
Need some rest, brain took a leave of absence !

That confirms my suspicions of it being a 3 phase motor, i saw 3 heat sink transistors on the board with their pins going straight to the motor connector.
That complicates things a bit, but not much as the 3 phase drives for that size are cheap enough.....
Oh hell, i just checked again, it draws over 50A nominal !
Back to square one, you need an RC brush-less motor drive, preferably sensored as the motor has sensors built in.
Subsequently, that requires a different type of control, namely pulse duration modulation, usually from 1 to 2ms, and i recall a user here did make a similar setup work to the point of being useful.
I also know there is an option of choosing PDM in stepconfig regarding spindle control but i never used it so i am not sure it is about the same thing.
Do some digging, see what you can find.

That will work, but very low power.
RC ESC , for remote controled cars and planes and drones. They go up to 220A at 20 ish volts.
Your motor needs 50A at 6.something volts, so any of those RC ones will do, even the 2S ones.

Yup that is it.
It is nice as it has manual controls so you can use it as is manually.
It can be controlled from Linuxcnc but Linuxcnc outputs PWM or pulse width modulation, while that ESC uses pulse duration modulation, not the same thing, close, but not the same.
That would also require a big transformer !!!