from anilam to emc2?

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11 Mar 2011 04:34 #7716 by brmachineshop
i have a supermax ycm40 3 axis cnc knee mill. it has an anilam crusader m series controller. the controller is old and unreliable, keeps going out. the machine already has servo motors, glass scales, and the crusader controls and drivers, etc. i had read on a forum on another site that emc2 would probably work using my existing servos, glass scales, drivers, etc. i am hoping that i can. if anyone knows if this is the case, and how i can do it, any and all help would be greatly appreciated. thanks. my direct email is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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11 Mar 2011 11:51 #7724 by andypugh
Replied by andypugh on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?
Yes, that sounds like a reasonably straightforward conversion.
Typically you would use the existing power electronics (motors, drives and power supplies) then link them via some external hardware to a PC running EMC2. The position control loop is then closed inside the EMC2 software, which would tend to just use the motor encoders, but can be configured to use glass scales too. (There is some debate as to whether this achieves very much).

EMC2 is flexible enough that it can drive just about any machine you can imagine. The price of that flexibility is that you may have to do some hand-configuration of files.

There is also a slightly baffling array of choices for the interface between the EMC2 PC and the servo drives. If the drives take a PWM input then the minimum hardware requirement is just wires to the parallel port. If they need analogue voltage then the minimum is a parallel port, a resistor and a capacitor. That is the absolute minimum, and is not what I would recommend for a machine like yours. Apart from anything else I think you will be needing a lot more IO lines than a parallel port provides.

Many people have done very good knee-mill conversions using the Pico PPMC system:
www.pico-systems.com/motion.html

Personally I am an advocate of the Mesa Electronics interfaces.
www.mesanet.com
They do a range of Parallel port and PCI interfaced cards, many of which are natively supported by EMC2.
A typical setup for a machine like yours would use:
5i23 PCI interface card (72 IO pins)
7i33TA Quad analogue servo interface (this assumes that your drives take a 0-10V input)
7i37TA Isolated IO card for the other IO (possibly 2 of them, if you need more than 8 out and 16 inputs)

Do you know if the glass-scale values are available digitally? It might be easier just to use them to create an accurate screw compensation map (something built in to EMC2) and then keep them for manual machining.

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14 Mar 2011 01:48 #7802 by brmachineshop
thank you. so basically if i buy the three boards from mesanet and hook those up, all i will need to do is configure emc2 and it will work? i know the configuring may be a challenge but im up for learning it. also, will ubuntu and emc2 run on windows based pcs or have to get a mac? thanks

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14 Mar 2011 10:43 #7810 by andypugh
Replied by andypugh on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?
brmachineshop wrote:

thank you. so basically if i buy the three boards from mesanet and hook those up, all i will need to do is configure emc2 and it will work?

Effectively, yes. Working out what needs to hook up to where is the tricky part, and knowing what sort of signal should be on each wire.

also, will ubuntu and emc2 run on windows based pcs or have to get a mac? thanks

You definitely don't need to get a Mac (though I think that Ubuntu and EMC2 would install on the Intel Macs). The computer needs to be a generic PC-compatible machine. However, once you have installed Ununtu on it it won't be a Windows machine any more as Linux is a complete replacement Operating System (Ubuntu is a version of Linux)

It makes sense to have a dedicated machine as the machine controller, and not to expect to use it for anything else. It doesn't need to be anything particularly high-spec. A number of us are having excellent results with the Intel D510MO motherboard ($70)

If you download the LiveCD from the links top left of this site, though, you can boot any PC from the CD and experiment with Ubuntu and EMC2 without making any changes to the PC. That's probably a good first step.

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19 Mar 2011 00:06 #7924 by brmachineshop
the drawing i looked at didnt show the 7i37 board. will the 7i33 and 5i23 ve the only ones required? thanks

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19 Mar 2011 00:32 #7926 by andypugh
Replied by andypugh on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?
That picture was just for the servos.
The 7i37 is a general-purpose IO board, useful for isolating the electronics from the machine voltages. The Mesa Card is a 3.3V device which is safe to 5V, you probably have 12V and 24V signals on the machine.

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21 Mar 2011 23:00 #7987 by Graydog
Replied by Graydog on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?
so I've not been around for a while, working way to hard. but this post caught my eye.

I have used a Bridgeport for the last may be 6 yrs on EMC now EMC2 lastest.
this was fitted with a anilam CII driving Norwin servo boards, glass slides ect.

The convertion now uses a vital MONTEC-100 cards. full out can drive at 2.5m/s. I think the linit is the glass slides.
I'm now using a 2.8ghz P4 1gig ram.

the convertion is sraight forward, one has to make a couple of AB interface cards and fit EN relays.
but is the daddy!!!!

believe it or not this 2.25m car was made on the 900mm bed. but the big thing is check out the canopy full 3d milling of the old mill.
solarcarwales.co.uk/Design.html

Just finished convertion of an old boxford conect121, this though steppers of the parallel port.
and sorted a Denford Triac last year.

so if your using the norwin 2210 type servo boards, rebuild and install using the BDI about 24hrs.

regards
Gd

ps thank EMC team...... must do a blog

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26 May 2011 10:06 #10085 by Rick G
Replied by Rick G on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?
Hello Brad,

How is the project going?

Rick G

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26 May 2011 19:11 #10097 by andypugh
Replied by andypugh on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?

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27 May 2011 11:00 #10110 by Rick G
Replied by Rick G on topic Re:from anilam to emc2?
Andy,

Thanks for the link.
A friend of mine has a Super Max Crusader M series which has some issues and he has asked about converting. I have suggested EMC with the Mesa cards.
I will need to research this more to see how practical it is.

Rick G

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