One more Biesse rover 322

Hi Everyone, I recently got a hold of a Biesse rover 322 and started to prepare for the linuxcnc retrofit!

Hardware I went for: 7i92 + 7i77 + 7i84 + 7i74 and will add a couple more cards while progressing with I/Os. I will give a shot to the raspberry pi 4 to run linuxcnc. Thank you for the image already prepared!

I have configured the cards and spent the last couple of days to go around and check the machine. Regarding documentation I have very fragmented parts of the schematics but the original user manual and error manual. The machine used to run but it was recently moved. I got some errors from the CNI controller and currently have a couple of questions:

• I am using the shop air compressor to supply the machine and I have the Z axis drive set to "Pot". Reading around it looks like this should be solved when connecting air but when connecting the compressor although the guards and spindles rise, the Z axis doesnt really move. I was wondering if this is normal and I should just jog off the Z axis or if it should already come out by itself when simply connecting air? The valves on the left hand side (looking towards the machine) do not show any pressure in the system but removing the bottom front covers I see two manometers and I read around 7bars of pressure on the top one and 6 on the bottom one. I manually checked the pneumatic connectors on the Z axis cylinders and there seems to be air pressure


• The Argolux au s-twin is in state "break/fail" but unfortunately I do not have the schematics documenting the pins for this and jsut started tracing them. If anyone has schematics and would be so kind to share them it would be amazing! As I saw that effectively this shuts down most of the 24Vdc to the machine, is it possible that the Z axis problem is somehow related to some solenoids potentially not receiving power and shutting down part of the air supply?

Thank you!

Thank you for the tip Tommy! I made quite a bit of progress, the safety relays issues was related to faulty photelectric sensors... I will have to substitute this. Nonetheless I got the startup loop figured out and connected e-stop and start to Linuxcnc, got encoders and motors connected, tuned and with proper encoder scaling and home switches connected! I am trying to leave the machine as-is as much as possible and so far it has worked out.

Now I am connecting spindles, I managed to reuse the existing circuitry for spindle start/stop which I wired to the spindleena of the 7i77 but now I am trying to figure out the most efficient way to set spindle speed as the old controller is configured to talk to the VFD via rs 485 and first of all me having a Raspberry Pi 4 I need to get a shield if I want to try to go down that road plus write a custom python script with the protocol the VFD uses. From the manual it doesnt look bad at al, seems relatively strightfoward, nonetheless it will be a bit of work.

I saw bevins used classic ladder and the analog input of the drives. I think I might have found a possibly easier way do do this by reconfiguring pins 1,2,3 of the VFD ( Commander CD 750 manual - page 47) so that they can be used for a "spindle at speed" signal and then simply connect the analog inputs of the drive to the 7i77 as these can also be configured as bipolar with +-10V. I would then connect a relay coil to pins 1 and 2 of the drive (the N/O) and then when at-speed these will energise the realy and send +24V to one of the 7i77 inputs to be connected in hal to spindle at speed. Does this make sense?

The other option would be to get a simple adapter for the Pi and then write a python script to handle communication. From the VFD manual it doesnt seem that bad but it looks like more work than just using the analog signal. Has anyone had any experience with doing this for this VFD? I found some examples but not for this one

Another question I had was if you had any suggestions on how to tackle multiple spindles in linuxcnc? Here I have 3 main spindles connected to air cylinders that can get lowered down plus several smaller units that (it seems) can all be individually lowered. What is the most appropriate way to handle this? I saw that things have changed in Linuxcnc 2.8 and I am using the new notation but i was not able to find a lot of examples

Hey tommylight, any news on your retrofit? I'm really interested because I got a Rover 322 myself.
I'd be really grateful if you could share your configuration files, so I could check my calculations (scaling etc.) when I'm at that point..

Whoops.. I meant fed-zh1, must've been tired yesterday   Still thanks for replying and all your efforts, I see you all over the board. 
But your plasma builds are also very impressive.. so much great stuff on here!