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.

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.

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.

He went with Mach3.

www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/cnc-machin...o-conversion-221759/

(He might be back)